A Devil Went To Oregon
by cagd
Summary: Five Nights at Freddy's/Monster High? Well, maybe - but it's not the cartoon/toy version but the three novels that inspired them - three books that deal with some interesting questions. This follows what happens after our story, "Midnight Run" (We will finish, promise!). Watch carefully! You may encounter Black Butler and Creepy Pastas! (Among others.)
1. The Cost of Doing Business

_Los Angeles, Circus Baby's Pizza World, July 201-, 2:00 a.m._

Charlie had never really been told "no".

Not by her father before the incident involving an older prototype animatronic that killed him and sent her to live with Aunt Jen not long before her sixteenth birthday.

From there, the distinct lack of "no" in her life extended to her rather lackadaisical aunt Jen who let her do… _whatever._

In high school and college, she was never hard up for a date –she always made sure they earned every second with her because her time was valuable.

While still a sophomore at Caltech studying robotics, she won back her father's company from Wolfram and Hart, and took over the reins. She'd cut staff and costs and raised prices while taking over the maintenance and upkeep of the stable of animatronics she'd inherited. If there was the occasional death after hours, it was merely the cost of business – it cost money to live in Laurel Canyon and drive the cars she preferred.

And when the whole mess went belly up thanks to a n unexpected Federal tax audit that led to decade's worth of creative accounting, it wasn't her fault. At least she'd managed to hide the off the book employees, mainly night guards, again, the cost of doing business in the City of Angels.

As for John, once her accountant, and Arnold her ten-year-old son, who needed them?

She'd lost track of those two deadweights once she could afford a house in Laurel Canyon and the ink on the divorce papers had dried. Child support wasn't her problem – that's what accountants on retainer were for. If John still blamed her for the divorce? Well, that was his problem!

He should have been a better husband.

And Arnold should have been a better son.

Anyway, Arnold with his embarrassing behavioral problems was John's problem, now. Not hers.

Speaking of problems, she now stood in the echoing remains of Circus Baby's Pizza World, ready for quick liquidation in tomorrow's auction, surrounded by assets harvested from the other restaurants in the chain of kiddie entertainment venues her father and a neighbor, Hank Afton, had founded back in the mid 1980s.

Chapter 1 Bankruptcy caught her unawares during the agonizing Federal audit - also not her fault. Beach houses and summers in Europe weren't cheap, so she'd sold her main walking assets off to a collector in Japan, only to have the money seized by creditors the second it changed hands.

Again, not her fault.

It also wasn't her fault that there had been a steady increase in lawsuits, insurance claims, and a sharp dropoff in customers once the unfounded rumors about what happened after hours got out.

Charlie walked up to the largest of the last of the unsold animatronics, Funtime Freddy Fazbear. She'd mothballed him and the four biggest troublemakers not long after… it happened.

She circled the battered pink bear with his loose, moronic grin, shabby blue bunny puppet, and top hat, the heels of her business pumps clicking sharply in the echoing empty space.

She reached up and flipped a hidden switch on the big lumbering goof's chest. With a rising, high pitched whine the animatronic's painted blue eyes opened, head swiveling back and forth, massive grinning jaws clattering open and shut, to stand at loose attention, staring down at her.

"You lied to us." Came a quiet male voice from the speaker in its chest, a voice almost drowned out by the echoing metallic rhythm of what could only be described as mechanical breathing.

"You wouldn't have wanted Fazcorp to be shut down if the world found out what was going on, would you? They would have taken you and your "family" apart to see what went wrong, right?" Charlie smiled up into Mike's painted eyes. "It would have meant you and the others would have been destroyed. I did you a favor by putting you all in storage."

The light tenor deepened, "If caught, we wouldn't have told as long as you left us alone after hours." Flickering like an old television, Freddy's clumsy body was replaced by a tall, muscular blonde man in his late twenties wearing the shabby remains of a uniform, one second that of a night guard, the next of a Marine in combat fatigues. "

"What's going on?" Moving ponderously towards Charlie, he gestured around them at the piled high tables of candy colored restaurant equipment and electronics.

"Party's over, big guy." Charlie shrugged, her back to the deactivated animatronics: a fox, a cat, a dog, and a hulking ballerina, "Everything goes. Including you guys – I hear the market for rare metals is up these days. There'll be a bidding war."

The man jerked to a halt, processing her words. Taking advantage of his confusion, Charlie stepped closer. After mothballing the whole lot of 'em, she'd paid to look into the background of what possessed Freddles and been stunned - God he had been attractive before he'd let himself go! John was tall and skinny with acne scars and a thinning mop of brown hair and easily controlled. Why had she even bothered with him when she could have done so, so much better for herself?

"You lying bitch! You promised we'd be safe as long as we kept our mouths shut and didn't try to contact the law." The illusion that was Mike now loomed over her – he had been nearly seven feet tall when he was alive – God, how did he and the others do that? Change their appearance, fool the eyes of the unwary? She'd opened them all up, ignoring what the core of each of them contained, looking for answers and finding none. "And now this?"

Whatever. Charlie didn't really care as Mike backed her across the scarred black and white tiles until she came to an abrupt halt against a displaced pizza oven, unable to run from what her mind told her was a piece of kiddie entertainment that occasionally killed and her eyes told her was a man with a face like something out of a high end men's magazine.

Eyes closed and sweating, Charlie raised her face to his, whispering with a grin, "I could remove you from the inventory. The others I'll sell. I've already had a scrap dealer contact me trying to cut a deal. But you? All you have to say is…"

A cold hand grabbed her face, lifting her out of her shoes. Whimpering, Charlie opened her eyes.

Face flickering somewhere between cheap cartoon bear and man, Mike glared down at her.

"No." he grated, and then he dropped her.

"You ungrateful bastard!" Charlie pulled herself to her feet by one of the oven's handles, reached up, flipped a switch, and deactivated what had once been a man.

She'd see to it that "no" turned into yes.


	2. Migrane

_Los Angeles, nine hours later, the parking lot of Circus Baby's, July 2015_

"If I may have a word with you?" A voice slithered out of the heat of Los Angeles like so much silken rope. There was a faint accent to it, not quite British, possibly Japanese.

Barry Ogden, "B.O." to his friends, a permanently disheveled short, stocky man well past fifty in bright green sneakers, a loud Hawaiian shirt and worn plaid slacks, turned, surprised, to face a tall man, dark hair a black halo against the noonday sun. Squinting, he could make out an impeccably tailored suit and dark glasses, but little more.

"Uh, yeah, sure!" B.O. squinted harder. The man addressing him didn't come any clearer. In fact, there was a shadowy dazzle to him, like dark spots against the sun. B.O. reached into his hip pocket for his cell phone. Nuts generally weren't that well-dressed. It could be a drug dealer, or some religious nut by that black suit, but didn't those types travel in pairs?

"If I am correct, you've acquired five items of considerable size and value mere minutes ago and are preparing to call your accountant to procure a bank draft in order to pay for them?"

"Hell yeah! I bought 'em on auction, fair and square. This place, the entire chain is up for liquidation – dumb bitch that owned it ran it into the ground. I had the winning bid." For some reason, despite the heat, Marvin stopped sweating. He added, "Things were all but fallin' apart. I'll make back three times what I paid for the gold in the motherboards alone!"

"I see." His accoster had a strange thrum to his voice, almost a purr. "And pray tell, what did you pay, this amazing price?"

Without wanting to, Marvin dug into his hip pocket and pulled out the damp, sweaty receipt and unwillingly handed it to the stranger before nervously stepping back, stumbling over the curb as the stranger took it from him with a pale, slender hand.

The stranger studied the invoice through impossibly dark glasses, nodding thoughtfully. He handed the document back to B.O., who noticed that it was now a dry, pale brown, and beginning to crumble at the edges as if it had been set alight and then quickly blown out before it could be completely consumed.

B.O. stared down at it, cold sweat beading on his broad forehead.

"What would you say if…" The man, who was easily over seven feet tall, said conversationally, displaying perfect teeth that looked capable of effortlessly slicing through bone, "My employer, who will not be trifled with, were to offer you the anticipated amount you've stated, plus your original bid expenditure plus a ten percent increase, in small, used bills for your recent acquisition?"

B.O., a businessman despite his lousy dress sense, opened his mouth. And closed it. And opened it. And closed it. Unaccountably terrified, he licked his lips, squeaking in a very small voice, "I'd say we had a deal… sir?"

"Excellent." The stranger turned and began to walk away in impeccable snakeskin boots that accentuated rather than distracted from his suit. Punctuated by the precise ringing of expensive heels striking hot pavement, his voice trailed back to B.O. who was suddenly drenched in sweat and living up to his initials in the streaming heat rising from the parking lot, "Once you pay the cashier and bring me the receipt, there will be a delivery truck at the pickup point in exactly…" he stopped, pulling out a large, old fashioned gold watch from his coat pocket and studying it, "Fifteen minutes— no more, no less. There will be an exchange of currency. The items you have purchased will be loaded onto the truck. And then you will list this windfall on your taxes at the end of the year under "office supplies" because you will have forgotten all about this transaction. Do we have a deal?"

"Yes." B.O. whispered, reeling in the unreality of this entire encounter. The stranger snapped the watch shut, sliding it back into his jacket pocket, a pocket so exactly tailored that it didn't ruin the line of the suit whatsoever.

"Yes, what?" the stranger gave a small, sharp smile, eyes still hidden behind those inscrutable sunglasses.

"…sir?" B.O. gasped, realizing that he was working on a doozy of a migraine headache.

Funny thing was, at the age of 62, this was the first one he'd ever had in his life.

And that he'd wet his pants.


	3. Any Given Monday

_Salem Oregon, 201-, two years later, any given Monday_

 **The Queen of Lot 42**

It was another long, hot afternoon in the Kalapuya Gardens Trailer Park, and Marlys and her babysitter and BFF, Tina, sat, or rather lounged on the rough, splintery deck that was more or less attached to Marlys's mother's trailer, reading comic books while eating the three-day old convenience store hot dogs that Marlys's mother, Thelma, had brought home from work.

The hot dogs were an unofficial perk for Thelma, who was the night manager at the nearby 24-7. Every other morning, if she remembered to, Thelma would scrape the leathery, greasy things off of the little revolving grill beside her cash register into the cracked Tupperware she'd brought her lunch in, and put them in the 'fridge at home that worked when it felt like it, before promptly forgetting about them

Which was where Marlys and Tina (Short for "Tinamorph".) took over.

When you ran out of quarters and could no longer afford stale Twizzlers from the candy machine by the Kalapuya Gardens trailer park office, (and if you could avoid catching the eye of park manager Mrs. Sadie Mae Glutz with her eternal curlers who liked to yell at little kids for no reason), you could stick your arm up under the little glass door at the bottom and snag a bag of whatever was within easy reach – leathery convenience store hot dogs crusted with grease were a little bit of heaven even without the stolen catsup packets.

Anyway, tubby little Marlys, who looked like she'd been caught in the blowback of a body shop paint booth she was so covered with freckles, lazily handed Tina another 'dog.

Tina, enjoying the intense heat even in the shade of the cracked awning shadowing the deck, extended her inner mouth, accepted Tina's offering, and began thoughtfully chewing.

"Y'know," The bigger, well… girl, drawled, strings of drool slowly spilling down the sides of her massive, streamlined jaws, "If there's anything I like better than a 24-7 hot dog cold, it's ice cream."

"Yeah, me too." said Marlys, sunlight glinting from her smudged and much repaired glasses as she pulled her too small bathing suit out of her crack. "Only momma's sleepin' on her purse so we can't get no money." She paused, taking another bite from her own leathery hot dog with her bottlemouth teeth, adding, "Too bad Mrs. Glutz's sittin' out by the candy machine smokin' an' gettin' a tan so we can't swipe a pack of Twizzlers from th' machine for free."

The two girls stared up the pot-holed expanse of cracked, sizzling blacktop which ran between the straggling row of doublewides and dented pickup trucks at the skinny, elderly park manager who was parked in her yellow polka dot bikini on a lawn chair that had seen better days back in the 1950s, a piece of cardboard wrapped in tinfoil under her chin, harlequin glasses jostling with a crooked pair of cheap sunglasses on her beaky nose, office phone on the ground beside her sharing space with a diet Coke that was mostly rum and an overflowing ash tray.

Soooo, no hope there, and of course Marlys's mom's latest boyfriend had eaten all the Twinkies, while Tina's dad Larry, who was usually good for a buck after his sixth beer, didn't get paid until Tuesday – which was three days away.

Damn.

There was a door slam across the way.

Double damn.

Heather Courtney sashayed down the iron stairs leading up into the new doublewide that had showed up a month before while Marlys was still in school, slowly licking the edges of a Klondike bar, curly blonde ponytails bouncing in time with each step.

Heather Courtney, whose dad worked for the power company and whose mom had gone to Community College and was an LPN over at the free clinic, was perfect.

Nauseatingly perfect.

And she knew it.

Heather strutted across the scorched patch of grass that her dad mowed every Sunday whether it needed it or not and past her mother's little blue Honda Civic, before casually ambling around the new above ground swimming pool that nobody else was allowed to use, and minced her way in new Crocs (purple) across the cracked street towards Marlys and Tina, licking ice cream as it oozed out of the chocolate shell she carefully held wrapped in a paper towel before it could reach her fingers or spill down her pristine Disney Princesses one-piece.

Tina's black carapace rasped against the weathered wooden railing as she rose, hot dog forgotten.

"Klondike bar." Seven-year-old Marlys whispered, awe struck at such conspicuous wealth in the land of bulk-purchase Otter Pops. Licking her lips, her own thin red pig-tails two scraggly brushes on either side of her face, she said hopefully while slipping on her broken flip flops, "Got some for us?"

The queen of lot 42 paused, appraising her subjects coolly. Flick. Flick. Her pink tongue captured more sweet dribbles before she bit into the chocolate shell of the Klondike bar with an audible crunch, baring perfect white teeth.

"Nope."

"Awwwww!" Marlys wailed, "Why not?"

Tina hissed, raising the bony frill that dominated the back of her elongated head with the two bicycle tassels duct taped to either side of her skull where there should have been eyes, bits of convenience store hot dog falling out of her inner mouth.

Unimpressed, Heather licked another dribble of unnaturally white artificial dairy product before it could reach her fingers with their perfect pink nails, "'Cause you're on the welfare, and your mommy's boyfriend drinks up allllll the money!"

"We ain't on no welfare!" Marlys shrieked, turning purple, "Momma works every night at the 24-7, an' Jason don't drink, he just smokes pot!"

"Same. Thing." Heather cooed angelically between licks, the ruffles of her bathing suit accentuating her sass as dancing, she revolved slowly so that her butt was now waving at Marlys and Tina, singing, "You ain't got no ice cream! You ain't got no ice cream, 'cause your mommy's on the welfare— but I got ME some ice cream!"

Marlys rose and ran down the steps, fists flailing. Tina, who was somewhat in charge, reached out a black talon and snagged her by her sagging bathing suit straps, hissing, "It ain't worth it!"

"You ain't got no ice cream! You ain't got no…" Heather stopped in mid-dance, horrified as the coveted Klondike bar suddenly fell apart in the heat, landing with a splat on the pavement between her purple Crocs. She covered her mouth in horror screeching, "Waaaaaahhhhhhhh, you made me drop my ice cream - I'm telling!" as she ran red-faced and weeping towards her parent's doublewide, perfect ringlets bouncing.

Translucent fangs glittering, Tina gave a hissing laugh loaded with _Schadenfreunde_ as she released Marlys's bathing suit straps, "Guess she didn't see that coming. Serve her right!"

Pitching forward, Marlys caught herself on the deck railing. "Yeah," she said, sadly blotting her nose and then her eyes on the back of her arm before replacing her glasses. Catching a glimpse of what lay abandoned on the pavement, Marlys brightened, "It's still good, let's…"

"Ewwww, it's dirty!" Tina, who had learned the hard way that those big blue bins on wheels behind the wooden fence at the back of the trailer park weren't a smorgasbord, added, "Have another hot dog before Heather's dumb bitch of a mom comes out and screams at us for making her baby drop her ice cream. Hot dogs are good for you!"

They were sharing the last hot dog when Heather's mom in her LPN scrubs (decorated with little winged pigs and flying pies) heaved herself out of the doublewide across the street and screamed at them for making her baby drop her ice cream.

But even better, after Marlys and Tina went inside to watch "Dora the Explorer" reruns in the air conditioning, they peeked out through the hole in the crooked blinds just in time to catch Heather scraping up the melty remains of the Klondike bar and EATING it right off of street where Bratwurst, Mrs. Glutz's snappish elderly weiner dog, liked to pee.

 **New Kids on the Block**

The twins had been stalking the prey in this new hunting ground for weeks.

The prey was aware of them, pausing, sniffing, looking around, but seeing nothing.

As it should be.

The prey was hairy. Hairy even for oomans.

Oomans, as in _squishy_ meat.

Had the twin Hunters not been under strict orders from their mother to track only, to watch, to learn, the prey, which moved in a loose group around the enclave of oomans, feeding, interacting, would have been good first trophies in their respective family niches.

Trophies that would get the attention of girls.

Only, aside from their two sisters and their mother, the twins hadn't seen any real Yautja GIRLS aside from pictures. But, (click-click-rattle!) what PICTURES!

GIRLS with sharp mandibles and big talons!

GIRLS with big muscles, tiny yellow eyes, and dreadlocks topping them off like a nest of very sexy snakes!

Heavily armed, muscular GIRLS with small breasts, armored bras, and green freckled skins who towered over them and who might deign to physically overpower them…

…the possibilities were mandible-rattling exciting!

Only, what tragedy for two ambitious and virile brothers, there were none to be found to impress- it was enough to make a Yautja of sixteen solar cycles want to rip his dreads out!

(Even had GIRLS been present; so far they'd not had any chance to earn the trophies that would get GIRLS to look at them beyond what they'd brought home for family meals – arrrrrrrghhhh!)

So the two brothers had to backpedal, reassess the situation, and find other ways to pass the time.

Until GIRLS somehow miraculously appeared.

And that the way to pass the time was FOOTBALL.

The brothers first noticed football on the monitors that still worked on the spacecraft that had crash landed in the jungles of the southern landmass years ago, stranding their parents, and been fascinated.

It wasn't exactly killing for trophies, but close. Two mobs of squishy meat acting in that uncannily cooperative way that they did would hurl what the brothers eventually pieced together was a "football" at each other. (Why? The brothers had no idea. You couldn't eat it, and when you poked it with a spear, it made a disappointing hissing "pop" noise as it died without a struggle.) And then, while wearing brightly colored combat gear and tight pants, the oomans would chase the "football" while beating each other up in the process.

Amazing! Exciting! And, can we join this Hunt?

"What a waste of time!" Their mother had rattled at them when she caught them crouched in front of a monitor displaying football one cold, rainy day, "Where's the skulls on poles? Now turn that silly thing off, go outside, and kill something.

Mom was right, football made no sense, but it was… _wonderful._

Even more puzzling, ooman GiRLS, ugly things with big breasts, large eyes, and worse, no mandibles to lock with, would stand off to the sides and be impressed.

You could tell they were impressed because they would wave fluffy things instead of spears at the ooman males as they grappled over the football. Though the Yautja language didn't have a word for "fluffy", the twin brothers knew "fluffy" when they saw it.

Ditto, "impressed". Otherwise, why would ooman GIRLS jump up and down, shrieking appreciation for a well-done brawl where the warriors doing the brawling sometimes had to limp or be carried off the hunting ground on a stretcher by other squishy meat?

Fredator crouched invisibly in a big old pine tree watching this group of oomans, the hairy ones, who all smelled alike sparred, maybe for an upcoming battle in front of appreciative GIRLS.

The branch shook violently when Tedator, landed beside him. His equally invisible twin gave a quiet, questioning click from behind his breathing mask.

Fredator paused thoughtfully before responding with a quiet chirp.

Cautiously, because you never knew what oomans, particularly in a large group, were going to do, the two dropped, landing silently on the grass beneath the tree.

One after the other, they shut off their Cloaks to stand in plain sight of the prey, twin brothers with featureless breathing masks and wearing matching action green Seattle Seahawks jerseys who had to duck sideways through ooman doorways they were so big, and waited.

Nostrils flaring, the Wolf brothers stopped playing football in their parent's big front yard, the one called Clawd holding the football he'd caught from one of his older brothers.

Fredator reached slowly down into the net bag hanging from his belt for the object that had been bumping against his muscular thigh all morning, pulled it out, and stepped towards the hairy oomans with a whistling click that meant, "Hunt with us!"

The hairy ooman holding the well-gnawed football stepped forward, handing it off to one of the other hairy oomans and cautiously took what Fredator offered.

He bared his teeth in appreciation (Fredator and Tedator had learned by watching the hairy oomans interact that this was not necessarily a challenge to a fight.) and accepted their gift, a brand-new football that Fredator and Tedator's mother had picked up for them at the sporting goods store along with the matching 'hawks jerseys on her way home from work last night after stopping behind the local slaughterhouse for their usual evening meal of takeout.

He looked back at the rest of the pack and gabbled something.

The hairy ooman then tossed the gift Fredator had presented him with up and down a few times, made that weird strangling noise that indicated laughter, nodded his bizarre, mandible-less head, and with a snap, tossed the spinning ball at Tedator, who caught it with an excited mandible rattle – success!

The other hairy oomans ran back to the open space among the trees and took up the positions that Fredator and Tedator had memorized from watching hour after hour of football on the video screen. Clawd gestured at Fredator and Tedator, and the two massive Yautja youths lumbered heavily after him, taking up opposing sides.

Ooman GIRLS weren't as excitingly beautiful as Yautja maidens ready to wrestle two amazingly accomplished brothers with great big trophy displays into submission, but they would be good practice until the real thing showed up.

 **Gracious Living**

Tina slipped quietly through the living room of the sagging doublewide that had been her home since her "birth" two years before. She froze when the huge, lumpy mound on the ruined couch that was her mother hissed and grumbled in her sleep in the blue-white light of the television that was tuned to no particular channel since Tina's father had forgotten to pay the cable bill. Again.

Something else Tina would have to take over the responsibility for.

When the hissing complaints died down, Tina relaxed and continued, cautiously picking her way across the dirty carpet, stepping over her endless supply of younger sibling's toys, hoping she wouldn't step on a Lego on her way to the door outside.

A moment later, happily Lego-free, Tina stepped over the smaller lump of her father, who lay face down in his khaki-colored janitorial coverall among the broken toys, empty fast food wrappers, and beer cans – he looked dead in the half-light of the big screen television that dominated one end of the little living room with its beat-up chairs, torn curtains, and seemingly nonstop overall chaos – chaos that Tina was determined to tame despite her family.

If Martha Stewart could do it, why couldn't Tina? (Perhaps if she somehow persuaded the rest of the family to let her lock them in the little storage shed behind the trailer?)

She cautiously opened the battered front door, picked up the huge golf umbrella she'd found in the dumpster at the end of the little _cul de sac_ that their trailer occupied at the back of Kalapuya Gardens Trailer Park, and stepped out in the blazing half-past noon sunlight of early June while deploying the umbrella and the portable shadows it created.

Quickly, because her mother would wake up any moment now and start demanding everything in sight while swearing at her father for being a lazy-no-good bum, Tina and her big umbrella skittered towards the trailer park office, pulling a business envelope out of a fold in her exoskeleton in a shower of Skittles, hoping that she not only had the right amount of postage on the envelope, but that she'd created a signature that would pass as her mother's on the paperwork inside even as she sped up to beat the USPS truck heading towards the long bank of dented mailboxes that stood outside the office.

Whew! (She made it.)

Tina casually slipped the big manila envelope into the mail slot just as the USPS truck came to a squeaky halt, idling as it's operator climbed out carrying a mail sack.

"Hello, Postman Pat, Mr. P, yoo hoo!" Tina gave a whistling squeal that passed as a giggle for her as she waved one auxiliary arm at him (one of a pair halfway down her torso, three fingers each – handy thing, it allowed her to hold a 2L bottle of Diet Coke within easy reach while she used her main upper set of arms and seven-fingered hands to grip the precious _Martha Stewart Living_ magazines that she occasionally pulled out of the nearby dumpster so she could ogle the beautiful, ORGANIZED living rooms and summer houses and banquets with pretty floral centerpieces that the little bits of ambition contained while Marlys read comic books and squabbled with Heather across the street.

Mr. P, the postman, gave a curt nod, heavy dreadlocks bobbing in slow motion time to his lumbering steps as his thick, bowed muscular legs carried him past her to the mailboxes, the dull metal of his breather mask glinting in the sledge-hammer sun as he handed her a mangled copy of _House Beautiful_ on his way past.

"Thanks!" Tina warbled, blowing him a kiss. Mr. P. was soooooooooo nice. Mr. P sometimes gave Tina scuffed up magazines that nobody wanted. _House Beautiful_ was even better than _Women's Day_. Occasionally he'd pass along the gold standard of lifestyle magazines: _Seventeen,_ but not very often.

Tina tucked _House Beautiful_ away in a fold of her carapace for when Marlys awoke from her nap – Marlys was sweet, but she was seven years old. Tina was hungry for kids her own age. Kids she could hang out with. Kids she could talk with. Kids who had ambition.

Teenagers, in other words.

So, ignoring her mother's hissing, drooling complaints of, "Why you want education? You gonna be nothin' but mother, like me! Education waste of time! Sit! Lay eggs, is easy – gimme potato chips, NOW!" after she'd asked if she could go to school THIS year instead of NEXT year as always promised, Tina angrily downloaded the enrollment forms for high school off the Internet on the trailer park manager's computer earlier in the day while Marlys played with Bratwurst, and filled them out with the purple rhinestone encrusted ball point pen she kept beneath her stash of Skittles.

Marlys's school books had outlived their usefulness, likewise books Tina scrounged from the dumpster and then borrowed from the Salem Public Library, (she'd caused quite a stir when she'd gone to the front desk to apply for a library card with Marlys in her home-made ballet costume made out from Band-Aids and Wonder Bread bags in tow) because magazines only got you so far – so, she'd had to forge her mother's non-existent signature.

Tina turned around and saw that Mr. P had picked up the envelope with her hopes for the future tucked inside. She could see it among the letters and bills in the plastic tray beside him as he waved at her on his way out of the trailer park.

"Whew…" Tina breathed, adding, "Two and a half months to go… oh, please, PLEASE don't let whoever takes care of things like this realize mom wouldn't even recognize her own name written out, much the less write it down herself!"

 **Third Wheel**

Summer, Draculaura had come to the conclusion, sucked.

For a vampire, even a vegan one, this was saying a lot.

She HAD been looking forward to spending the summer wearing little more than 200 spf sunscreen and a French bikini in pink and black with her friends and Clawd, her boyfriend on the beach between cookouts, road trips, volunteering at the local animal shelter, a summer part time paid internship at nearby vet clinic, and maybe, just maybe finally getting her driver's license.

And dad coming home – he'd announced during last week's Skype chat that seeing as Rads were now living out in the open, he, as a nominal ruler of Rads, needed to relocate his main office to Salem.

Which meant he'd have time to do things with Draculaura.

Only so far, he was so busy making sure his office was being set up to his satisfaction in downtown Salem that he didn't have time to eat dinner with her, much the less take her to L.A. for the weekend to shop.

But they would. Once things settled down. He'd take her to New York, London, Tokyo, and Paris.

Sigh. Right dad. Later dad.

Worse, Clawd, her boyfriend, didn't have much time for Draculaura, either.

Clawd was taking core classes at the community college this summer when he wasn't working for his dad's construction company to pay for those classes. In between building things and English 101, Clawd volunteer coached at the Junior League football camp over at one of the big city parks to keep his skills up for next Fall when he played for the University of Oregon in Eugene.

Another sigh.

Clawdeen, his twin and one of Draculaura's best friends, was also a no-go. She got sick the last week of school and missed Cleo's big party because she didn't take her annual summer heartworm pill like everybody else in the family, "I mean, nobody ever gets them. Anyway, the things taste nasty, so I flushed mine down the toidy when mom wasn't looking!"

However, the family vet had other things to say about that, and now a thoroughly humiliated Clawdeen had to stay home for the next sixty days complete with back pains and a lot of vomiting.

Which meant no beach for Clawdeen, either, but she was already sewing up next school year's wardrobe just to have something to do.

Fashion was Draculaura's thing; but sitting watching her friend sit behind sewing machine with pins in her mouth MAKING fashion, was not.

Sigh. Sigh. Sigh.

No beach for Cleo de Nile, either. Draculaura had been there when Cleo's dad firmly announced that instead of sitting around the house doing her nails all summer, Cleo was going to Cairo, Illinois to help eccentric great aunt Neferraru pack up her things and move to Salem because life was dangerous for an old lady of 3,000 who lived alone, owned fifty cats, and fell a lot.

Cleo forgot her cool, shrieking: "Ewwwwww, dad! Great aunt Neferraru? She smells like mothballs and wears off the rack!"

Cleo's dad gave Cleo "the look".

Cleo lobbed "the look" back.

With interest.

Cleo's dad then said, "I have spoken." And gone back to perusing a catalog of antiquities for sale at next week's Christie's auction in London.

So now, Cleo was Skyping Draculaura every evening after dinner from flyover country to complain about the smell of mothballs, cats, and being under the same roof as a closet full of cheap double-knit polyester pantsuits.

Sigh?

Melody Carver's family were on a summer world cruise. Draculaura's dad had offered to pay for Draculaura to go with them, but as much as they wanted Melody to have a friend along, the Carver's were trying to have some family bonding time, and well… you understand, don't you?

Disappointed sigh. Draculaura liked Melody's sister almost as much as Melody and had looked forward to hanging out with her on a cruise ship. Sigh. Sigh. Sigh.

Which left Frankie Stein. Which was cool, but even Frankie had a life that didn't include Draculaura 24-7 – her parents were having her take biology classes over at the community college, and she had just taken a babysitting job to help pay for car repairs after she kinda-sorta dented the Stein's new Escalade last week by sideswiping their mailbox while borrowing the car to go to Starbucks without asking first.

Or owning a valid driver's license, for that matter. Whoops!

That whole sitch was weird. Frankie's parents could easily afford to have the car and the mailbox fixed – so why did they give Frankie the choice to either pay for the damage, clean up the mess, and work on getting her license, or be grounded from Cleo's big end of school party last week? As far as Dracularua was concerned, you broke something, you apologized, and then your Uncle Vlad took care of the rest. When Draculaura finally asked, Frankie grumbled "I think it's to make me think twice before I borrow stuff without asking, or something like that."

"Sigh-Oh!"

Flicker. There it was again!

A flash of pink and white in the bushes… "Huh?" Draculaura blinked. Did she just see…

Now, where was she, "Sigh."

Still, it was fun walking around the neighborhood with Frankie and a stroller full of sleeping baby, which was why Draculaura and the big hot pink designer umbrella her father had sent to her from Pairs for her birthday were braving the morning sun as she minced her way towards Frankie's house, with its clean 1930s lines and big wind turbine out back.

Flicker.

Draculaura's big violet eyes axBBWS to the bushes alongside the street. There it was again, a flash of white and hot pink.

Something was following her.

Forgetting her sighs, and pretending nothing was happening, the petite vampire turned into the Stein's driveway, stepped over the remains of the Stein's mailbox and the big Siamese cat sunning itself beside the mess who ignored her with pointed disdain, and minced towards the big, white house across the close-cropped lawn on jeweled platform sandals, eyes alert.

Flicker, another flash of pink and white – yes!

A sharp little face with huge blue eyes stared out from under the Stein's precisely trimmed bushes.

"Ooooooh!" Delighted, Draculaura dropped to her knees, snapping her fingers, "Puppy!" she cooed, open umbrella rolling away unheeded.

She whistled, snapping her fingers again.

And then stood up, blinking.

A girl with blonde hair streaked with pink that was exactly Draculaura's size stared back at her from where she'd just seen the puppy.

"Not puppy." The girl, who was barefoot and wearing cutoffs and a t-shirt paired with a pink and white fur collar said warily, "Fox!"

 **A Not So New Baby**

"So, I'm not going to have a little brother after all?" Puzzled, Frankie Stein looked down at the marble slab in her father's workshop at the detached head in its stand, wire leads snaking towards the battery neatly placed beside the large, muscular body wearing one of Frankie's dad's old bathrobes.

"No, dear." Vivica Stein smiled, putting her arm around her daughter's mint green shoulders, "Whatever gave you the idea your father and I were even considering adding to the family without discussing it with you first?"

"But, but," Frankie looked down at the head. It was a more refined version of her father's, only with blonde stubble where the hair was starting to come in, so it COULD have been a son) but it wasn't, well, green.

The head, the neck bearing a strange red collar, opened blue eyes and stared at her, mouth slowly working. Undisturbed, because if you were a Stein, this was normal, Frankie said, "Hi! I'm Frankie, Frankie Stein. And you are?" Remembering her manners, Frankie crouched down so that she was face to, well, head, with the person who currently lay unassembled on her father's home workbench.

The lips moved again.

"He says "hello"." Her mother translated, while adjusting the Bluetooth speaker beside the head, "Mr. Schmidt? How are you feeling this morning?" she said, joining her daughter.

The mouth moved again, this time making a blaring, incoherent sound.

"I'm sorry, Michael… no, Mike?" The blue eyes closed once, opening almost immediately. "Mike, we'll be fine-tuning your motor and speech centers today. You'll have to be conscious for that, I'm afraid."

This time the blue eyes closed for several heartbeats before opening slowly. Vivica tilted her exquisite face, a sympathetic frown creasing it, "I know, it's disorienting, Mike, but that's the way it is. Would you like to watch television until Viktor is ready to start fine tuning?"

The eyes closed, opening quickly, a second blink.

"No television? Maybe a podcast?"

The intensely blue eyes flickered towards the expensive sound system that Frankie's father kept on a corner shelf so that he could listen to the ball game whenever he was puttering around in his lab on any given Sunday afternoon, "NPR? Country? Rap? Classic rock?"

"Mike" blinked at classic rock. Vivica rose, releasing Frankie's hand. Her own head overflowing with questions, Frankie stood, watching her mother slip a set of earbuds into it's, (No need to be rude here!) no HIS ears before turning on the sound system. The eyes eased shut, the face relaxing. After sliding the collection of dog-eared photographs of that littered the table around "Mike" of him attached to his body with his arm around a dark-haired woman in waaaaaaay outdated clothes into a folder, Vivica gestured at Frankie to follow her out into the hallway after angling "Mike's" head so that it, no HE, could look out the window at one of Frankie's dad's many hummingbird feeders if HE wanted to.

"Mom, if Mike's not my little brother, then… is he an uncle in for repairs? Frankie asked, excited at the possibility of new family – family that for some reason her parents hadn't included in the memory package they'd supplied her with when they'd made her. As far as she knew, her kind always came in pairs, which meant that he had a daughter or son her age to hang out with. Maybe that's who the dark-haired woman was. Maybe they'd all come and visit, which would be really cool.

Then a thought struck her. Without thinking, Frankie blurted out, "Sooooo, if he's family, why isn't he green?"

"No. He's not family." Vivica, in her weekend ensemble of yoga pants and a University of Oregon tank top said while looking down at her bare feet, She gnawed on her lower lip as if coming to a tough decision. Finally she sighed, gesturing at the kitchen down the hall, "He's a runaway."

 ** _Tabula Rasa_**

Puck slid out from under the slab where new Mike's body lay waiting for activation.

She hated this house.

She hated this town.

She hated the Steins.

Particularly their daughter, Frankie.

She wanted to get the Hell out of here, taking Mike and her twin, Maggie, with her.

Life on the run had been simple: after being reactivated from long term storage, they'd been paraded in front of a crowd of serious looking adults in what Puck at first mistook for a bare warehouse, Mike ordered everyone to grab what spare parts they could stuff into their bodies, and follow him out of the unaccountably stripped Circus Baby's Pizza World without a word of explanation, and into the Maze, which was no longer the friendly playground Puck remembered.

Mike had been clearly terrified the whole time.

Which was saying a lot: Mike didn't spook easily.

Out of the Maze and somewhere in Cleveland, they stole clothes to hide the fact that they weren't human anymore and hadn't been for a long time.

They tapped into power lines to keep themselves going.

When not slipping back into the Maze for as long as they could without deteriorating, the group broke up, zigzagging across the country, sometimes dipping into Mexico or up into Canada – using marks in chalk and scratches to let the others know they were all right, not daring direct contact once Mike admitted that Charlie was after them.

Sometimes it was her and Maggie and Mike, hitchhiking, sneaking onto trucks, slipping into shipping crates, stealing car batteries to keep themselves going, even as Mike, the largest of them, literally fell apart.

They would meet, swapping partners; sometimes it was Mike and Raina and Maggie.

Or Maggie and Puck and Jeremy – now almost all dog.

Or just Maggie and Raina.

Or Puck and Raina, and sometimes Jeremy.

Raina was the newest even if she'd been an adult like Mike when she'd been turned. Mike favored her over everyone else even if he said he didn't. Puck didn't exactly dislike Raina, but she wasn't sure about the big clumsy ballerina even as they shared an extension cord they'd plugged into some stranger's outdoor outlet.

Puck was never sure about anybody, not since her mother put her up for adoption when she was little, keeping Maggie, who was the fluffy little papillon to Puck's long-legged greyhound, because she was "cuter". The two had somehow managed to keep in touch despite Puck's maze-path through the foster care system and twice being adopted – they stuck to Mike who had found them in the dark after they'd killed him.

Mike was the only sure thing that Puck recognized. Problem was, Mike was dying.

His massive four-hundred-pound body, draped in stolen clothing, limped; the sockets in his hips and knees grinding audibly with each step as they crossed the country yet again. The twins had clever hands compared to his massive, blunt paws, but the combination of poor maintenance before they ran away with being caught out in the weather too many times were beyond them as he'd directed them on how to fix whatever problem his failing frame tossed at them – a deterioration that sped up when he realized that the shock collars they all wore thanks to Charlie might be how she'd nearly caught them in Chicago and then in Tulsa – there was some sort of tracking device wired into them. If he could get their collars off and leave them somewhere, they would be free.

Problem was, the collars were hardwired directly into their electrical systems. If anybody attempted to remove them, well, it was ugly. Jeremy had tried to cut his off early in their run. Now he was more dog than the autistic young man he'd started out as.

But if it meant shaking Charlie for good, it was worth the risk. Without bothering to tell Puck and Maggie what he was about to do, Mike somehow slid his massive fingers under the red band that encircled his thick neck, took a chance, and yanked.

Only to go down smoking and convulsing same as Jeremy had, only worse, as the electricity that allowed Mike to exist, fried him.

Mike now deaf, speechless, blind, and unable to open the Maze for them, Puck took over, sensing there was little time left, and followed a set of hobo marks that the five of them had never made, while watching things unwind in Salem, Oregon from the safe distance of stolen newspapers – joining the underground railway to the northwest of the unwanted after the hidden came out in the open in the shape of a werewolf, a mummy, and a… whatever Frankie Stein was.

By the time the grinding hulk that was Mike collapsed, they were a hundred miles away. Unable to think of anything better, the twins loaded Mike's carcass into a shipping container at a UPS depot, climbed in after him, and had themselves delivered to the Stein house, C.O.D.

Oh sure, once they got over their shock at the unasked for gift they found on their front doorstep, Victor and Vivica Stein had been kind, but Puck wasn't sure if she liked what they'd done to Mike by making him human, almost, again – using a dog-eared picture of their protector with his arm around a laughing, human Raina from a long time ago and far, far away, as a template.

With Puck and Maggie, who had murdered him not long after the picture had been taken, nowhere in sight.

This made Puck, who barely remembered that murder, uncomfortable, as she and Maggie took turns like Mike had taught them, watching the Steins craft Mike a body from his old, burned out one.

A body that would pass as human as long as he wore clothes.

A body that would no longer need Puck or Maggie's help to keep going.

A body that would carry Mike far away from them, leaving Puck and her twin alone in the dark once again.

Ears and tail sagging, the cat-girl animatronic that had once been a star of Circus Baby Pizza World's main stage, climbed up onto the slab to huddle against the massive body that would soon no longer need her.


	4. The First Day

_Salem, Oregon, 201-, two months later._

 **Fish Out of Water**

Seven-year-old Ruby Sargent sat disconsolate in the principal's office.

She had disgraced her clan.

Worse, she had humiliated her mother.

She'd felt so proud carrying her first big girl spear into the elementary school building past the tall ooman who wore a uniform like her mother's.

He had smiled at Ruby, waving her in after he'd stopped the cars in the street, so she could walk across without a confrontation.

Feeling like she was representing her clan in style, Ruby had swaggered into the building, _Dora the Explorer_ lunch box in one hand, spear in the other, only… she somehow got turned around and didn't know where to go.

Worse, she was the only Yautja in sight, though she saw some ooman girls, ones with dark skin, with hair like hers, all done up in big girl dreads like her mother's.

Only they had pretty beads in theirs, beads shaped like little animals, beads shaped like hearts. Round beads arranged like rainbows.

Ruby. Didn't.

Her mother had put bone beads in hers.

Plain, icky white ones that she'd been proud of until she saw the ooman girl's beads, all bright colors.

And some of the ooman girls who wore beads and dreads had their dreads arranged in cool tassels on either side of their heads, with some of it in loose puffs like the plants called dan'd'lions.

Others wore their dreads braided in stars, stripes, squares, and hearts.

More astonishing, the lighter skinned ooman girls wore their hair like waterfalls and it came in all sorts of colors.

Hers didn't.

The light skinned girls and some of the dark-skinned girls had hair that went in all directions, it was what her father called "curly".

Her's. Wasn't.

They didn't wear breathing masks like she had to.

Worse, when she took hers off to say "Hi." like her father told her to for politeness, the ooman children pulled away and didn't want to Hunt with her on the playground.

It seems mandibles weren't as cool as she thought they were. (Even if you'd buffed and buffed and buffed in front of the mirror and then oiled them for extra pretty shine after breakfast.)

That was when Ruby had the uncomfortable realization that she was the only one wearing body armor.

Feeling thoroughly out of place and ugly, the usually self-possessed Ruby who happily told her older brothers every morning what to do since she was old enough to talk, had a meltdown in the middle of the hallway because:

She didn't know where she was supposed to go,

Somebody had swiped her lunch box, and

For the first time in her life Ruby felt ugly.

So, Ruby had sat down, spear at her side, on the cold, hard tiles of the hallway of Salem Elementary and bawled her eyes out.

Only because Yautja don't have tear ducts, Ruby had to make do with throwing her head back, extending her mandibles as far as they would stretch, and howl.

The sound of breaking glass had been gratifying.

Finally, the ooman who wore a uniform like her mother's picked Ruby up and carried her at arm's length to that most dreaded of shame holes, the "Principal's Office" until the Principal could figure out what to do with her.

The bench shifted as a ooman child in a grubby dress and mismatched sandals sat down beside Ruby and began swinging her feet.

Her blunt claws were painted all different colors, something _else_ Ruby didn't have and suddenly found herself wanting very badly.

She too, had been crying. Her gooey eyes were red and she sniffled from the funny knob in the middle of her face.

Speaking of eyes, she had four, like Ruby's father.

Interesting.

"I'm Marlys. What'cha do to get sent to the principal's office?" Four eyes said in between sniffles. "I got sent to the office because Bobby Fuller said I was fat and smelled like an ash tray. So, I blew my nose on his new Ninja Turtles t-shirt while he was wearing it – what's your name?"

"Ruby." Ruby chirped.

"Cool!" Four Eyes, no MARLYS, shook her head, which had two red tufts poking out of the top. "Watch this!" she said and then buried her face deep in a tissue before making a wet blowing sound.

Awestruck by this hitherto unheard of super power, Ruby rattled her mandibles – the closest thing to a giggle a Yautja pup could produce. This was so far the best thing that had happened to her today, maybe in her entire _life!_

Marlys pulled the tissue away from her face and smugly offered it to Ruby, "Allergies are awesome. You should get some!"

Enthralled, Ruby studied Marlys's rubbery, sticky green masterpiece as rain began to spatter the sidewalk outside.

Boogers were… wonderful.

 **Rainy Day Blues**

Puck still wasn't sure what to think about last summer as she walked through the cafeteria, wearing her backpack like a total geek when everybody else left theirs hanging on one of the hooks by the double doors that led into the reeking room.

She would have done it too, only she needed the battery built into the bottom of the blue nylon bag– it was either that or eventually run down and fall flat on her face. Then _everybody_ would know she wasn't, well, _human._

 _Rads and normies aside, I'd just as soon keep the world guessing because it's none of their damned business what I am!_

She paused near the table of popular girls just long enough to catch Maggie, her twin's eye.

Maggie wore makeup and new clothes: a mini dress and platforms and sat next to Draculaura who was wearing an identical outfit, pointedly looked the other way.

The two sisters had had a fight in their shared room in the guest house behind the Stein's big art deco house before Uncle Mike had dropped them off at school on his way to his new job.

Well, Puck, anyway. Cleo deNile's dad had given her a new convertible, Nile blue, last week as a reward for getting her driver's license. All the other girls from the neighborhood piled in, including Maggie, who'd changed a lot since they'd washed up in Salem.

But not Puck.

Cleo then disdainfully made one of those apologies that everybody including Puck really knew _wasn't._

Then the little Porsche zipped off, leaving Puck in a cloud of exhaust facing the choice of walking the mile to school or ride the school bus, which was mostly elementary and junior high kids and smelled like armmpits.

Gross.

Maybe it was time to get a job and get one of those little scooters that you didn't need a license to drive.

Better yet, a motorcycle like Uncle Mike's.

Or maybe like Aunt Raina's.

As for the fight, it started the second Puck's twin asked Puck why she had to be so damned embarrassing all the time?

Without waiting for Puck to answer, Maggie loudly started listing what she hated about Puck: her bad fashion sense, her bad temper, her bad hair, her not choosing to let the Stein's fix her like they'd done Uncle Mike, Aunt Raina, and herself – why did Puck have to be so klunky in her old body and baggy, concealing clothes when she could be _pretty_ like Maggie?

Puck returned fire by reminding Maggie that Maggie had stood by while Springtrap murdered her and laughed about it the whole time with her scuzzy boyfriend, Vinnie before those two had run off to do God knows what.

Maggie, who lately didn't like to be reminded about their shared past, had hurled a sunlamp at her.

By the time Uncle Mike intervened, dragging the grappling girls out into the driveway between the Stein's house and their borrowed one, Puck had yanked Maggie's hair out of its careful style and Maggie had left fang marks on Puck's still metal arms – and their shared room had been trashed.

Uncle Mike, barefoot and half in his new uniform and half out with shaving cream still on his face angrily tossed them one after the other into the Stein's new koi pond, or he would have, except that Puck, not wanting to deal with shorting out and killing the koi because the koi were _cool_ , (plus she had a brand new copy of _Lord of the Flies_ in her backpack that she didn't want ruined) had scrambled up his arm and crouched hissing at her now bawling waterlogged sister.

Yelling at all three of them while Jeremy bounced around them barking hysterically, Aunt Raina pulled Puck off of Uncle Mike, while Uncle Mike pulled the weeping Maggie out of the pond.

Aunt Raina getting involved had been the neon pink icing on the (very dropped) singing cupcake with eyes.

Aunt Raina getting involved meant they all had to stay away from each other until it was time to go to school or work while Aunt Raina stood in the hallway directing bad-tempered traffic.

Aunt Raina getting involved meant that when Cleo and her bitch pack pulled up to the curb in front of the house, Puck had an audience when Maggie, now dry and dressed as if it had never happened, looked her in the eye from the back of Cleo's Porsche and said, "You know what Puck? I _used_ to be able to stand being around you for more than fifteen minutes."

Then Cleo gunned it, and the Porsche crammed full of giggling girls except for Puck, shot down the street, leaving Puck and her new blue backpack with its battery plugged into her lower back standing in a cloud of exhaust.

But at least _Lord of the Flies_ hadn't dissed her. So far.

Aunt Raina intercepted Puck's angrily extended middle digit, laughed, and mimed swatting her with the newspaper, before turning back towards the guest house in time to give Uncle Mike the onceover as he climbed aboard his Goldwing motorcycle: picking invisible lint off of his black police uniform while handing him the big metal lunchbox that contained a spare battery pack before the two of them (OMG, could this day get any WORSE?) KISSED!

Thoroughly squicked out by the sight of public old person smoochies, Puck reluctantly climbed onto the back of the motorcycle only to regret her existence further when her uncle dropped her off early at the new High School where people could see them before driving around to the back to park in the Resource Officer's slot.

Oh God, not that, too.

Yes, Puck's uncle had not only taken a job with the local police department, but for some reason the Universe which clearly HATED her, had seen fit to humiliate her further by getting him assigned to Merston High School as the official SRO.

Why not a direct lightning strike? It would be a lot less painful for starters.

There was a rumble of thunder and a few drops of rain landed on the sidewalk, so a thoroughly miserable Puck pulled her old bomber jacket up over her head, wanting to pull her arms in its voluminous sleeves, followed by her legs so that she'd just be a nameless, faceless worn brown leather lump on the ground that somebody would want to spray paint their initials on.

Or words with four letters.

Like "Fuck".

Avoiding the further humiliation of a public shorting out, Puck walked past the smelly guy with the dead eyes peeking out at her from under his grubby white hoodie and braved the first day of High School without her sister, who once again, was breaking yet another promise.

 **Jeff is Jeff is Jeff**

Jeff knew he didn't belong at Merston.

How or why he knew this, Jeff didn't know.

Or care.

Still the bell, the voices, the smells, pulled him closer so that he stood watching the lit windows, drenched by the first of the big Autumn rains, lank hair limp, and water sloshing around his worn sneakers.

Unblinking, Jeff turned around, and began the long trudge back to sanctuary in the downpour, smiling a Glasgow smile.

 **Meter Maid**

Sargent casually lifted the ooman vehicle with one hand, slapped a boot on the left front tire, and dropped it so that the illegally parked car bounced. Adjusting the police cap that she'd carefully velcroed to her broad, high forehead earlier in the morning, she folded her eight-foot frame back into the truck assigned to her as an official vehicle, the golf cart most parking enforcement officers used was too small for her.

She'd been on traffic detail for over a year. It was time for a promotion.

After all, she had mouths to feed – even if Patador was now delivering mail on one of the worst mail routs in town (Which he liked. It was exciting, you never knew what might happen!).

Fredator and Tedator ate everything in sight while wandering around her bower in their underpants stinking up everything they came in contact with – and it wasn't cheap.

And Ruby, the youngest didn't know any other place.

Her oldest, three rattles and a click (Ba'Doom'Tiss!, for short…) worked as a game warden on an estate five miles away and could fend for herself, but now she wanted to go to University and that cost money.

Money Sargent didn't have.

Still, she didn't regret bringing her family all the way up from a place that the oomans called "Columbia" – working for a living was easier than trying to keep track of her unruly descendants and their skeezy sire in the jungles of Colombia, watch the skies for rescue, AND hunt.

Truthfully, Sargent really didn't want to go back to the clan that she'd been separated from.

Not with a mate like Pat, who was short, bowlegged, and had terrible eyesight. He'd been her spear carrier on a solo hunt and scheduled for castration because of his obvious inferiority once they returned to the main armada.

Only something had gone horribly, horribly wrong.

After ten solar cycles, the stranded Sargent, wanting pups, had given in to his increasingly frantic courtship – by Yautja standards, his unabashedly clever traps for prey were… cute.

Cuteness aside, Sargent was afraid for her children.

Their sire was inferior, even if he had good ideas and could talk his way out of nearly anything, something you needed around oomans if you were going to live among them.

Ba'Doom'Tiss!, was short, too short, for a girl – who would want her?

Fredator had a terrible speech impediment that would get him castrated.

Tedator would survive, easily, but there wasn't as much opportunity to move up among the Yautja as there was among oomans. He could still be castrated because his father was inferior.

Ruby, Sargent's pride and joy, would be taken away from her and raised by another clan.

As for Pat, ugly and near-sighted as he was, she held affection for the homely little squirt.

Somewhat.

Thunder rumbled.

Sargent stopped the truck, and got out, looked up at the turbulent sky, and then spread her mandibles wide so that some of the sudden downpour was funneled into her mouth.

Delicious.

Maybe a letter, a letter that Ruby or Fred wouldn't have to read to her out loud because she'd been attending ABLE classes religiously all summer, would be waiting in the mailbox tonight after she got home from work.

A letter informing her she'd finally been promoted to a full member of the Salem Police Department and not just an underpaid drone in a silly hat handing out tickets in all weather.

 **Lunch Table Blues**

Great, thanks to Maggie being such a stuck-up bitch with her new cool friends, Puck had to sit by herself in the lunchroom watching everyone else eat – at least she had _Lord of the Flies_ to keep her company.

She walked past the vegan table.

Nope.

She walked past the gluten free table.

Nope.

Followed by the fish, peanut, and dairy-free tables.

Nope x3!

The jock table.

As if!

The mean girl table.

You have got to be joking.

The band geek table.

Meh.

The orchestra dork table.

Feh.

The artsy table. The theatre creep table.

Eh.

The gamer table.

No. Thanks.

The nerd table.

You what?

Finally, the SJW table.

No. Just, NO.

All options exhausted, Puck found herself and _The Lord_ standing at the back of the cafeteria staring out the back door at the patio with its steel tables and overhanging sheltering metal roof, studying the clearly labeled "alternative diet" table with a sinking heart and rising alarm that rivaled her feelings when she learned two days ago that Uncle Mike was going to be the SRO at Merston this year.

Seated by herself was one of the most bizarre kids Puck'd ever seen in her existence, dead, alive, or somewhere in-between – which that was saying something, considering that she was the ghost of a murdered girl deliberately anchored in the shell of an anthropomorphic Siamese cat that could do acrobatics and had been for nearly thirty years.

She, (or was it "he"?) smiled up at Puck, eyeless head topped by a huge frill that may or may not have been a hat or part of her long head. (You never knew in this freak show.)

"Hi!" giggled the unexpected inner mouth that shot out of her jaws, "I'm Tina, Tina Morph. What's your name?"

 **Gainful Employment**

Mike had spent the last two months preparing for today and still felt like none of this was real.

The body, the situation, the job, none of it.

He'd worked hard to break old habits – of compensating for hips and knees that were metal grinding on metal and a body with a low center of gravity.

Of hands that were more like paws.

Of reaching for things that he couldn't pick up with those paws.

Of having no sense of smell when suddenly the world assailed him nose first.

Of no sense of touch when now the slightest current of air felt like a slap.

Of vision that no longer came in through a twin set of miniature cameras and was now color,

Of hearing that didn't fade in and out with static. (If Mike didn't consider himself already 7/8ths crazy, this alone would have been enough to push him over the remaining 1/8th.)

Had he let it.

This time he'd been lucky, starting when he looked in the mirror that Mrs. Stein held in front of his detached head and was startled to see the man he vaguely remembered being almost thirty years before and not some pizza grease smeared plastic toy.

He had responsibilities: Raina, the girls, and Jeremy, who preferred to sleep on the back porch of the guest house in the sun when he wasn't chasing squirrels.

And oh God, what did all of this cost? His rebuild. Raina and Maggie's slow piece by piece rebuild even as Puck refused anything beyond basic maintenance. As for Jeremy, all Mike got for an answer was a bark - still, they couldn't live in the Stein's guest house forever!

So when Viktor, in the middle of tuning Mike's new central nervous system casually mentioned that there was a job opening at the police department, and that if Mike wanted it, he knew someone who could put in a good word for him.

So Mike said "yes". before going outside to mow the Stein's lawn.

Though still learning how to walk and talk again while picking things up without breaking them, Mike managed to bull his way through the interview even as ne nervously wondered why they didn't ask for a resume and who was that short, dark guy with the widow's peak who sat off to the side saying nothing, dark, hooded eyes glittering.

He got a call a day later while he was trimming the hedges that lined the front of the Stein's house –The City was willing to pay him every month in cash if he accepted their offer.

It was a cop's salary, barely more than what he'd made as a Marine Lieutentant back in the 90s, but unless you counted a monthly electric bill of terrifying proportions, they didn't eat, and if they kept expenses down, he could figure out their next move even as he paid the Steins back while accumulating enough money to buy Raina, the girls, and Jeremy from Fazcorp so they'd be safe if he wasn't so lucky the next time.

So, Mike accepted, taking midnight runs when he wasn't doing nonstop pushups with one and then both girls and then the girls and Raina on his back so he could survive the required refresher course – as far as Salem was concerned, on paper, he was a recently retired ex-Marine with three dependents and a background in law enforcement.

Which was what the little guy, Vlad-something-something Tepes, had told him that afternoon when he accepted the job.

Tepes had played close to his brocade vest behind his huge ebony desk in his downtown office.

Mike had no idea _what_ the guy was, but he suspected Tepes was some sort of Rad, a Rad who preferred to work in the shadows.

Tepes clearly wasn't happy about the Rads being outed, but there was no nailing the coffin shut now that the corpse had escaped and was running around in exposing itself to anybody who would look; they'd all have to live with it. The little man with the penetrating, unblinking stare needed someone inside the school who could pass as a Normie to keep an eye on things.

Mike was the best candidate he'd seen so far.

If Mike did his job, there would be… compensation.

Such as a new identity.

Likewise, his two nieces.

And his wife.

It would be legal.

All Mike had to do was follow orders.

Tepes would take care of the rest.

Soaked where his black issue raincoat left off at the knees, Mike finished directing traffic in the rain in front of Merston High school and still dripping, squelched into his little office to one side of the big administrative one to change shoes. Lunch hour was over; it was time for him to inspect the fire alarms because it was Wednesday.

 **Why do fools fall in love?**

Fredator, or "Fred" to the Wolf brothers, and now anybody who noticed him, looked back at the lunchroom over his shoulder, cooler under one massive arm.

The Sargent brothers had initially sat with the jocks until they'd opened the lunches their mother had carefully packed for them and dug in, only to realize that everyone was staring at them as delicious blood and other bovine body fluids dripped down their chins.

Talons bloody, Fred then noticed that the other bros, including two of the younger hairy Wolf brothers, were eating off trays while using forks.

Worse, the food on those trays had been burned beyond recognition.

That was when the school's diversity counselor nervously scurried up to them and urged them to their feet and away from the table, leading them outside through a pair of double doors to a _different_ table.

Suspicious that they'd somehow been exiled from the Hunt their mother assured them they belonged to on the first day without even trying, Fred lumbered after the diversity counselor, a tiny ooman named Ms. Goode with a squishy middle and long graying brown hair who fussed and fussed and fussed, Ted right behind him as rain hammered on the metal roof overhead.

Only to stop and gape.

Sitting at the new table was the most amazing creature he'd ever seen in his short life – talking to an ooman GIRL with animal ears and a glum expression.

She (PLEASE let it be a SHE!) was a glistening black, had no visible eyes, two sets of arms and not one but TWO mouths. Still more fetching, she had decorated her big head frill with fluttering ribbons in the school colors!

Blushing, a now sweating Fred dropped his lunch on the tabletop across from this fantastic discovery with a thump. Fred, who until now had been planning to translate Shakespeare back into the original Yautja so the full impact of the powerful prose could be experienced by future audiences, landed hard on the groaning steel bench, removed his breathing mask, shook out his dreads, opened his lunch, and dug in, Shakespeare forgotten. What kind of trophy would impress this stunning, obviously high in demand GIRL, and where could he hunt it?

As for Ted, a simple soul with a burning crush on the head lunch lady, a large ooman with a mole on her chin that deserved its own ZIP code, he sat across from Fred noisily slurping down an entire raw cow's liver while wondering what would earn him the lunch lady's heart the fastest: a bull moose for two or a freshly killed football?

On the other mandible, obviously the tall flat-chested and unbelievably HOT ooman GIRL with animal ears sitting across from the great big GIRL with no eyes and two mouths would LOVE a freshly killed football!

 **Under My Skin**

Mike and the girls finally out of her hair, Raina scooped the last of the displaced pebbles from the Stein's koi pond as the big, slow brightly colored fish brushed her hands like so many friendly scaled cats and leaned forward beside the water into Child's Pose after untying the strings of her bikini top, enjoying the sun on her recently tattooed back and upper arms as it fed her. Like Mike, she declined to go Stein "green".

They weren't Steins, and, no offense, never would be, so why look like one?

Behind closed doors in the guest house, Mike agreed, "If things go belly up, we need to be able to blend in, to disappear if we can't get back into the Maze right away.

The Maze.

Mike controlled it, whatever it was, but since they'd all been reactivated two years before, the Maze acted funny.

Sometimes it let them in, sometimes it didn't, though Puck seemed to have better luck with it lately, but maybe this was because Mike and the girls turned out to be blood relatives – something all four of them were still attempting to wrap their head around.

Ummmm…. right… anyway, back to the Maze and it's unaccountable behavior.

Blood relative aside, when the Maze did let them in, it wasn't the familiar, friendly place that wrapped itself around them, creating playgrounds and puzzles when it didn't shape itself into wonders or releasing interesting people like her _babcias_ , her long dead grandmothers, or others when they needed them the most.

If Raina didn't know better, she would have sworn the Maze was… sulking.

She looked down at her arms where swirls of red, green, aqua, brown, purple, and turquoise floral and water patterns wrapped around them, crossedher shoulders and down to the small of her back where a patch of intense green easily hidden by her clothes if necessary, pooled before swirling down her legs and the tops of her feet.

Not ink, Raina corrected herself, _algae._

Algae which had been injected into her new synthetic skin like ink.

Raina didn't understand how it worked, but if she couldn't get to a battery or a wall socket, she could always "feed" by exposing herself to sunlight or a UV lamp because intricate tattoos even on women were all the rage these days. Who would think that her "optional" extras were what kept her, and Mike moving and thinking?

Mike's "tattoos" were more masculine: flames, barbed wire, rattlesnakes, bears, and grinning skulls, that flared up his arms, across his upper chest and shoulders and up his neck before it wrapped around his torso and ended in a patch of intense green like Raina's only to trail down his legs to his ankles and feet.

She had blue-green wings tattooed down the synthetic skin on either side of her new titanium spinal column above the main feeder patch – Vivica had hemmed and hawed over Raina's request until she found a design online and translated it into code so that Raina spent three days on her new belly on the marble slab while computerized needles injected the design into her flesh and Mike helped distract her from the pain..

Mike's nieces didn't have theirs yet, but the Steins insisted that as they were younger, they should be allowed to actually "grow" before something as drastic as a full body design should even be considered.

Maggie was all for it, but Puck sullenly refused, only allowing the Steins to engineer portable batteries for her disguised as a backpack for school while Maggie spent ages agonizing over designs, letting them tinker here and there, eagerly anticipating what she'd look like when she was full "grown" while temporarily making do with the green patch recently installed on her lower back.

Meanwhile Puck slouched in the background, scowling at Mike, Raina, and Maggie as they basked together like lizards on a blanket on the guest house roof the way the Steins had taught them with Jeremy down below still the dog he had become after he'd tried to shed his collar.

The sun dimmed; Raina looked up, there was a storm coming in out of the west. She rose to her feet, watching the lightning on the horizon walk towards her, skin automatically pulling energy out of the approaching bad weather.

As much as Raina would like to stand out in the rain and eat, it was time to go back inside the house, close all the windows, and start reading the local want ads under a sunlamp.

Everybody but Raina had a place to go.

A job, any job, would help pass the time.

Anyway, Mike shouldn't have to pay for all this good fortune on his own.


	5. Over the Garden Wall

_Salem, Oregon, Saturday morning_

 **The Maze**

 _The Maze was bored._

 _The Maze was lonely._

 _So the Maze nosed around like an abandoned dog, feeling more than a little lost._

 _Which was weird. The Maze wasn't supposed to have feelings._

 _But it did._

 _It followed Mike for a while, hoping he would walk in and give it something to do._

 _The Maze liked Mike._

 _Mike was more fun than Circus Baby, who created it._

 _Mike sometimes brought others into the Maze._

 _The Maze had liked them, too._

 _They asked a lot of the Maze without saying anything._

 _But lately Mike ignored it._

 _He rarely brought anyone into it with him, when he did._

 _Forlorn, the Maze started looking for a new playmate._

 **Blood Money**

After parking the Goldwing by the Stein's garage, Mike, still in his Domino's uniform, stepped over the third punctured football this week on his way into the guest house.

After wrapping his hand in the clean shop rag he'd left on a nearby windowsill for this purpose, Mike picked up the "dead" football, turning it one-handedly until he found the puncture wound in exactly the same place as the previous two.

If this was some sort of threat because of his being a cop, it was a weird one.

At least it wasn't a dead dog or a flaming sack of shit.

Mike carefully dropped the useless football into the steel trash can he'd set aside for such things just in case things get out of hand, and quietly closed the lid.

He some free time before he went to one of Wolf and Son's work sites to pick up some extra hours doing a little off the books carpentry and bricklaying. A shower to get the stink of pizza out of his hair and skin followed by some time fooling around with Raina on the floor under the sunlamp in the living room would just about fill it up.

Mike stopped, head bowed, one foot over the threshold.

How forgetful could he be? Last night was payday.

He dug into his hip pocket, took out the roll of bills, a mixture of pay and delivery tips, lifted the loose paver beside the trash can, pulled out a sealed waterproof pouch, slipped the bills inside, resealed it, and replaced the paver.

Mike ducked his head under the doorframe and went inside, mentally counting the money after chasing Maggie out of the bathroom where she'd been perming her ears or whatever it was teenage girls did in bathrooms while other people who needed it more banged on the door and hollered. He started the only shower the little guest house had, ducked once more, and stepped in before began soaping up in the cramped space that barely accommodated his seven-foot frame.

And he'd found a few bar bands that needed a bassist and would let him have a portion of the night's take on the nights he wasn't delivering pizzas.

And the Merston head football coach had offered him an after-hours assistant coaching position.

Individually, all of these odd jobs weren't much, but if combined with the hours from Wolf and Sons on top of his cop's salary, Mike could in a few years buy his family's freedom and then pay back the Steins.

 **The Taste of Feet**

Tina Morph sat in a puddle of drool in the bushes. If Cleo de Nile didn't want her opinion on her dad's house's decor, why did she ask?

She was ruined. Just ruined.

Why did she have to go and open her big mouths?

 **Half-Remembered Memories**

Raina stepped out of the Queen of Peace Catholic Church's smallish main sanctuary, discreetly closing the door behind her.

She liked the quiet. It gave her time to think.

To remember.

Learning that her father had died in a motorcycle accident while they'd been turned off and placed in storage had been a not unexpected but still distressing shock. Dad had been a lot like that guy, what was his name? Maverick? that Tom Cruise played in _Top Gun._ Only slightly less reckless.

And taller. _Way_ taller.

In their wanderings to avoid Charlie, she'd managed to find time to visit the family plot in Detroit and his grave and at least two of her brothers, new white stones among the pink and gray granite.

Looking like an obese woman bundled up against the winter out walking her dog, she'd paid her respects one blustering January morning with the wind came roaring out of Canada, first her _babcias_ , her grandmothers, and then the grandfathers she'd never met..

It had been painful, but not as painful as she'd thought it would be.

Jeremy had sat there, head cocked, passing as the scruffy results of a one night's stand between an Old English sheepdog and a haystack, without saying a word as she paid her respects. She'd paused at her mother's grave, leaving a _Pysanky_ she'd found at a flea market in their ramblings.

It was appropriate, now that Raina knew what she'd encountered in the Maze was little more than a collection of half-remembered memories of a woman who'd died before Raina was four.

She'd noticed the little Parish church while taking a refresher course in helicopter piloting.

Tepes had arranged for the lessons, telling her that if she was going to be his personal pilot on standby, she needed to be up to date, to have her licenses and certifications renewed.

The job would be easy, he would pay her well.

Just be ready for his call.

And in-between, to keep her skills honed, he had arranged for her to fly air ambulance for Aero Med, a company he had controlling interest in.

At first Raina hesitated at even setting foot on the sidewalk leading to the main complex. She, Mike, and the girls, as she understood it, were abominations.

So she'd walked away.

The next day, taking a risk, she'd left her Harley Davidson by the cub and set one booted foot on the sidewalk.

No flames.

Not even smoke.

After fifteen minutes of standing in the early morning rain, Raina carefully moved towards the front door of the building, fully expecting to burst in to flame.

Only she didn't.

Raina then cautiously set her hand on the front door handle, just to see what would happen, and because it wasn't locked, walked in.

Not so much as a wisp of smoke here, either.

Bypassing the little Holy Water font, Raina (Why risk it?) then nervously sat down in one of the back pews and stared at the toes of her heavy boots. At the folded kneelers. And then up at the alter and then the confessional, remembering the first time she'd managed to coax the very Southern Baptist Mike into attending Mass with her at the Base chapel.

Red-eared, sweating, and reeking of Old Spice, he'd sat beside her in a white short sleeved shirt and black pants that were too short for him, strangled by a tie she didn't even know he owned. When everybody knelt, Mike stood, and then knelt when everybody stood before sitting down and dozing off during the Liturgy after mumbling at her with genuine puzzlement: "Church is music, how come ain't nobody here singin' but the priest?" Mike then sat by himself looking offended at being left out as Raina and the rest of the worshipers took Holy Communion, finishing by all but bolting out the front door at a dead run seconds after the blessing and dismissal had been given.

She'd kissed him on the front steps right in front of the priest after he admitted that it hadn't been as bad as he'd thought it would be; only next time would she PLEASE let him know when it was time to sit, kneel, and stand because the whole thing had been goddam embarrassing and that he'd do better next Sunday if the priest didn't kick him out for being such an asshole.

Last night Mike, while rubbing Aquaphor on her recently tattooed back, apologized for giving her such a piss-poor wedding, which had been the two of them jumping the broom in the Stein's driveway in front of the girls, Jeremy, and the Steins after he'd given her the ring he'd had made for her nearly two decades before, "Semper Fi".

She'd deserved better, she deserved the dress, and the flowers, and the big party afterwards and a priest in a grand robe– or whatever it was that things like them had, ending with Mike telling her he was sorry he'd failed her again.

Raina returned with, "So what?" and if what was happening to them lately kept happening, maybe she'd get the big wedding she'd always wanted. Meanwhile, what they had would do nicely so shut the fuck up and kiss me before the girls come in and pretend to barf all over the carpet like they always do.

So he had. (And they did.)

Raina nodded at the priest who'd come out of the vestry behind the altar, this time smiling at him. Maybe tomorrow she'd sneak into a back pew to catch his morning Mass, but today she had a written exam to pass.

After that, she'd risk Confession on the way home from the airfield.

 **Father Tim**

Father Tim waited for the lanky young woman who'd been slipping into his church every morning for nearly a month to ride her motorcycle out of the parking lot before locking the doors behind her.

There had been a lot of new faces in Salem since the Rads revealed themselves and refused to go back into hiding.

Understandably, not many had been interested in what Father Tim had to offer; the relationship between his vocation and Rads had always been… volatile.

He'd unlocked the doors that first morning, intending to go back and retrieve his vestments for the dry cleaners from the little room behind the main altar.

Fascinated he'd watched her walk in from behind the half-closed door of the vestry. She moved like a deer approaching water across an open meadow, as if expecting to be shot any second, but unable to stop herself.

It got so Father Tim, who thought he recognized her from somewhere else, looked forward every morning to her shy visits. It was always the same: she'd sit down for a few minutes, and then leave.

If she was what Father Tim suspected she was, as long as she was respectful, she was welcome.

 **Marlys**

Bored.

Bored.

Bored.

Tina, who was always cool to hang around with, was nowhere to be found.

Heather from across the way stuck her tongue out at Marlys when Marlys hopefully suggested she invite Marlys over to watch Netflix with her on their new flat screen while playing with Heather's Barbie Dream House.

Marlys gave Heather the finger and went back to wandering around the trailer park, Heather's screams of "I'mmmmmmmm tellllllllinggggggg!" echoing beautifully in her ears.

Bored.

Bored.

Bored.

Somebody tapped Marlys on the shoulder.

Marlys spun.

Nobody there.

She looked down around her feet, thinking that Heather had thrown a rock at her.

Nope, Anyway, tattling was more Heather's style.

Huh.

After picking up a rock, Marlys resumed her mission, hoping there'd be a pack of Twizzlers in the vending machine close enough to the little door at the bottom for her to reach in and snag.

Bored.

Bored.

Bored.

Tap! Tap!

Light glinting off of her thick-lensed glasses, Marlys spun once more, ready to hurl the rock at stinky no-good Courtney with her perfect hair and dumb old Barbie Dream House.

Only to stop, drop the rock, and grin.

Ruby stood in front of her right out of nowhere.

How'd she do that?

Not really caring, Marlys happily showed Ruby the fine art of coaxing an elderly vending machine into giving her what she wanted followed by the ecstasy of stale Twizzlers washed down with flat Dr. Thunder and reading _Archie_ comic books under a trailer and painting each other's nails.

Life couldn't _possibly_ get any better.

 **Maggie**

Last night's party at Cleo's house had been… AMAZING!

And Maggie, drab, crybaby little Maggie who once smelled like ashtrays and had too many little brothers and sisters, had been part of it.

Maggie with her lame sketch pad and shabby clothes.

She was finally part of something.

No, not just part, she'd helped MAKE it happen!

She and Draculaura had been trusted with the decorations and they had been FABULOUS, because Cleo said they were FABULOUS.

If Cleo de Nile said something was FABULOUS, it was FABULOUS.

She finished putting makeup on her new face and fluffing her new sparkling white neck ruff, Arctic fox ears, and fluffy tail twitching. Frankie's dad didn't think they were a good idea, but he'd engineered them for her anyway., Frankie had surprised her by having them pierced in all the right places before he'd installed them.

Frankie was FABULOUS.

Melody was FABULOUS – or rather her sister was – her feet were the same size as Maggie's once they'd been installed, replacing her clunky old cartoonish ones and she didn't mind sharing.

Clawdeen was FABULOUS, too. She made Draculaura's old clothes look good on Maggie's curvier frame and showed her how to make her new ears, ruff and tail look FABULOUS.

Clawdeen had helped Maggie and Draculaura match like photographic images, Maggie's blonde to Draculaura's brunette - everybody thought it was FABULOUS.

The Predator brothers had stood up on the little stage in Cleo's back yard and surprised everyone by being the coolest rappers EVER – turning themselves into living beatboxes – who knew the two hulking jocks were FABULOUS?

Boys, Rads and Normies (no, not "Normies", Frankie told her that was racist. Being a racist was NOT FABULOUS), paid attention to her, asking to text her, asking to be friended on Facebook, wanting to be seen with her – that had been FABULOUS too.

Puck had come to the party and skulked around in her baggy old coat and pants.

That had NOT been FABULOUS – thank GOD Puck had gone home early.

Maggie's sister was NOT FABULOUS but EMBARASSING.

Almost as embarrassing as that big Rad girl Tina Whatever.

But enough of NOT FABULOUS, Cleo and the rest of the girls were going shopping, and MAGGIE HAD BEEN INVITED!

Maggie, tired of wearing other people's clothes ran past where her aunt and uncle basked face down while holding hands under the big sunlamp hanging from the living room ceiling and out the front door of the Stein's guest house, pausing by the garbage can.

She knelt, lifted the paver, pulled out the sealed pouch, opened it, and slipped several large bills out of it and into the little Burberry clutch Draculaura had given her for her unbirthday last night.

It was time she had something new, something that she'd picked out herself.

Uncle Mike would understand.

 **Fredator**

Pacing and stripped to his underpants, Fredator paused in the middle of translating the third act of Shakespeare's _Titus Andronicus_ into the original Yautja to grin, upper mandibles stretched wide, while the paralyzed lower set sort of limply dangled no thanks to his big sister accidentally dropping him on his face when he was a newborn.

Last night had been gratifying. Arm twisting Tedator into helping him recite a few choice lines of his current translation project during the party had been a brilliant move.

The oomans OBVIOUSLY got what he was aiming for, the passion, the glory, the sheer POETRY of Shakespeare's (unaccountably) neglected major work. They had been so enraptured by his words that they'd actually DANCED and SCREAMED their appreciation.

But, who WOULDN'T love a saga where a maiden had her hands cut off and her tongue ripped out (he'd changed that bit to mandibles and talons, it made more sense that way) but STILL managed to avenge herself and her gallant but dead mate Bassinius upon their craven attackers?

Lavinia (Fred was seriously considering giving her a proper, sexy Yautja name like Click!Click!RattlePOP!) was HOT!

Roaring and snapping his dreads in all directions with the sound of many little whips, the inspired Fredator went back to consulting the English/Yautja dictionary he'd been compiling. Let his twin keep spearing footballs to get the attention of the (current) maiden of his hot, sweaty dreams, Fred intended to earn his with WORDS!

And oh, what WORDS, as Hamlet, the undeniable hero of Hamlet said/rattled, "Words, words words!"

Once the only known Shakespearean playwright/actor the Yautja race had produced to date finished _Titus Andronicus_ , he would tackle _Macbeth._

Complete with violent explosions and charging elephants.

 _Lots_ of charging elephants.

 **Animal Farm**

Having finished _Lord of the Flies_ and now working on, George Orwell's _Animal Farm_ , Puck had walked down the street to Cleo's big first week of school party with the vague feeling that she was being watched.

After fifteen minutes of wandering through crowds of classmates and other annoying things, she had to agree with Orwell, "Some pigs are more equal than others."

This conclusion reached, she'd walked away, spending the rest of the night drawing and listening to music in the room she and Maggie shared, plugged into the wall while Aunt Raina studied for some test or other under the big sunlamp in the living room.

Which suited Puck just fine.

Raina was okay.

But she missed Uncle Mike.

Who, it turned out, really was her uncle.

Mr. Stein said so.

Mr. Stein knew about that sort of thing. Why fight it?

He'd had to put Uncle Mike back together. In putting Uncle Mike back together, he'd had to open him up.

Where he found the part of Uncle Mike that made Uncle Mike, wellllll, Uncle Mike.

He'd been… horrified.

Which was saying a lot for a dude who could whip up a daughter from scratch like you'd bake a cake.

But he'd taken some of that stuff and used it to grow more stuff, stuff that would let Uncle Mike blend in as long as he kept his batteries charged.

Puck wasn't sure how she thought about this. Seeing Uncle Mike as the man he'd been before she and Maggie murdered him, only before he'd allowed himself to get fat and sad so that he now looked like a buff dude in his late twenties, was… unsettling.

She'd liked him better as a big clumsy pink and white animatronic bear. Oh well, it's not like anybody asked her.

Even more unsettling, after Aunt Raina let Mr. and Mrs. Stein work on her, Maggie decided she was tired of being a goofy looking pink and white animatronic fox and let the Steins do their magic.

That was when Mr. Stein did whatever it was he did and told them that Maggie was undoubtedly Uncle Mike's niece; so was Puck by extension. He'd confirm it if Puck would only give him a sample of what made Puck, Puck.

Puck had soundly told Mr. Stein to "Fuck off."

Speaking of missing, so was her beloved bomber jacket. Puck couldn't figure out where it'd gotten off to since she'd put it across the back of Uncle Mike's big easy chair, the one with all the duct tape holding its insides in. It had been her favorite garment since before she'd died the first time and had been glad to find it stuffed behind a bank of lockers at Freddy Fazbear's years later. It had been dusty and crumpled, but oil and wear had soon fixed that.

Maybe Aunt Raina had picked it up and put it in the closet. For somebody who'd once been a hotshot Navy chopper pilot, she was weird that way.

Thinking about this while carrying her sketchbook and a portable solar battery charger, Puck ambled across the Stein's back yard, ears and tail twitching free in the privacy the surrounding tall fence provided because Rad or not, she'd decided to finally put the baggy skater's pants, oversized beanie, and loose shirt she usually wore to hide what she was, in the wash.

Stripped down to a pair of cutoffs and one of Aunt Raina's tank tops, she steered towards the thick stand of rhododendron bushes at the back of the property in the early morning sunlight. Maybe the sensation of being spied upon was just her imagination, because it was gone now.

There was a place back there that Puck liked, it was private and quiet. She could doodle and daydream there undisturbed on a forgotten bench beneath the Autumn reds, oranges and golds which matched the random feathers she'd been finding around the place lately while recharging her batteries for her first day on the job when the tailor shop opened around ten in the morning.

The animatronic cat girl ducked under a branch, going from full sun to gentle twilight, the servos in her legs easily keeping her upright on the branch strewn irregular ground with Jeremy, the dog with almost human eyes, charging ahead of her, panting.

Funny, he didn't used to do that, pant. Gross.

And what was that smell?

It reminded her of that big girl she'd been sharing a table with in science and at lunch, what was it, Tina?

Something squidged under Puck's bare paws, ewww, sticky!

Jeremy's barks were becoming frantic – he almost sounded like a real dog, now. The Steins must have been tinkering with him. Not cool.

"Shut up, Fitzi— whoooooops!" Puck yelled, as with a mis-step, sticky became slippery and slippery sent her flying over backwards to land like Charlie Brown in the funny papers, sketchbook going one way, battery charger another.

Tina, who was chewing on something black leaned over Puck. She had gone from six feet to easily ten feet. Swallowing hastily, she said, "Puck, I didn't know you lived in this neighborhood. Are you all right?"

 **Meanwhile, Jeff…**

Jeff ambled through the brush taking paths that only he and maybe a fox or two knew of, towards sanctuary, towards wonderland.

He'd had a good time at Cleo's party, sticking to the shadows, not drawing attention to himself.

He would have to tell the others all about what he'd seen, the ones who could still listen, who still had ears.

Contentedly munching from one of the silver platters of exotic Middle Eastern dainties that Cleo had so considerately left lying around last night, Jeff thought his pink little sister might like the nice little bundles of green leaves wrapped around rice that you dipped in white stuff that tasted of cucumbers.

Or maybe the backlava.

Lala liked sweets.


	6. I am deeply offended

_Salem, Oregon, Merston High, sometime after lunch, early September, 201-_

 **I am deeply offended.**

Frankly put, Helen Goode loathed Officer Mike Schmidt.

He was everything she hated, though as an avowed vegan pacifist, she halted right at the threshold of hate, settling for "deeply offended by".

The mere presence of Mike at Merston High deeply offended Ms. Good mainly because he was:

1\. Career ex-military. She'd peeked in his file (For somebody in his early forties, Officer Schmidt seemed awfully well preserved, which wasn't fair.). This automatically made him an indiscriminate racist killer and a supporter of the corrupt military-industrial complex,

2\. CIS gender male, so obviously a patriarchal oppressor,

3\. White (So what if she herself was of German Irish descent and burned at the slightest sign of sun? She was here to make up for everything the paler portion of the Human race had ever inflicted upon their unfortunate darker neighbors.), and buff, (which meant he undoubtedly spent most of his time off duty lifting weights with his fratboy sexist buds) with blonde hair and blue eyes, and was a

4\. Blatantly sexist, racist Cracker every time he opened his mouth. As far as Helen was concerned, any accent that came from anywhere Africa, Asia, the Middle East, or South of the Border was acceptable, but one that even remotely sounded like it came from below the Mason Dixon line was everything Helen loathed about North America with its offensively patriarchal, colonialist, racist, expansionist policies, particularly the racist South.

5\. Oh, and he had tattoos. She'd caught glimpses of them. All over his arms. Undoubtedly culturally appropriated from some oppressed aboriginal population to bolster his false sense of machismo. (Never mind that half the artists and poets in her social circle had Tribal tattoos.)

Worse, Officer Schmidt was a harshly oppressive symbol of oppression deliberately placed in the high school as a message from the Man: conform or be cast out.

Widowed in her late forties when her husband, Gerald, in a burst of enthusiasm after reading the dogeared copy Euell Gibbons's _Stalking the Wild Asparagus_ that he'd rescued from a recycling bin, misidentified and then ate a poisonous Angel of Death mushroom he'd found growing behind their compost heap – after sauteéing it with wild garlic in soy butter, which caused him to literally shit himself to death.

Not long after Gerald's eco-friendly funeral, Ubuntu, their adopted South African son, despite her efforts to raise him to be a gentle, ethical innocent and nothing like her working class redneck father, joined the Air Force and was currently helping assemble bombs to drop on Syria. "Mom, for once in my life I feel like I belong and that I can make a difference. If you don't like it, well, that's your problem, not mine." Was all he said over the phone after graduating Basic somewhere in racist southern Texas and then hanging up on Helen's protests. Worse, he planned to make a career of it.

Bliss, who now called herself "Blissa", her biological daughter, at the age of 23, held a Harvard MBA, worked for Monsanto, and was now a Republican. "Mom, you were the one who was into social justice, cheap blue jeans, and compost, not me – pass the Evian water." Was all she had to say.

Even Gerald's beloved dog, Ché, named after the famous revolutionary, betrayed Helen by rejecting the ethical vegan diet his rescuer had formulated for him by shamelessly tearing to bloody bits an innocent groundhog which had been peacefully grazing in the remains of Gerald's now weed-filled organic vegetable garden.

Ché, obviously crazy with grief, had then gobbled the bloody bits down with no sign of remorse whatsoever.

Right in front of Helen.

(The last Helen saw of Ché, was him chained up in a neighbor's back yard contentedly eating factory farm-produced meat byproducts from a can out of an old Country Crock tub, surrounded by, ugh, well-chewed bones.)

Berift, betrayed, and facing losing the house she and Gerald had struggled to make environmentally friendly because somewhere along the way the two of them had decided that all their spare income should go towards funding a daily newspaper for the homeless and not into a life insurance policy, Helen forsook her Master's in Fine Arts and Women's Studies in favor of a quickie Bachelor of Arts in Social Work.

Which led to Ms. Goode becoming the third person in two years to fill the Diversity Advisor's position at Merston High

Luckily for Merston High, Helen fully intended to follow Gerald's example to be the one who "persevered and made a difference".

(Only, problem was, so far the Rads she'd resolved to help retain their unique cultural legacies intact in the face of oppressive U.S. racial policies, weren't interested.)

Take the Sargent brothers – two gentle, beautiful souls from an obviously pacifistic culture. They shouldn't be exposed to the senseless violence of football, like Ubuntu had been – which was doubtlessly why he was now indulging in senseless violence in Syria, perpetuating atrocities on a peace-loving indigenous population. (So what if the Syrians seemed intent upon inflicting senseless violence upon each other regardless if Ubuntu and his bombs were there or not?)

Anyway, there had been a growing tidal-wave of complaints from the uninformed and the prejudiced all because the boys (if that's what they were) gave off a distinct, well, _natural…_ ahem, _fragrance._

Like an entire boy's gym locker room after a big athletic event in hot weather, with the boys still in it. Which increased exponentially after the brothers had P.E, before going full bore come afternoon football practice.

Hopelessly bourgeois and doubtlessly WHITE parents started calling, insisting that the school impinge upon the Sargent brother's natural right to be natural because their odor was distracting, no, disgusting to their privileged offspring.

The school board, understandably nervous, consulted the district's attorneys with trepidation to be informed that it would be ticklish, but if approached appropriately, something could be done about it – that's what the Diversity Counselor was for. The district Superintendent called Helen, bluntly informing her that she was going to have to solve the… _problem._

Deeply offended on Fredator and Tedator's behalf, Helen, (aka: "Ms. Twatwaffle Sillypants" by all but certain tables in the cafeteria who adored her) in a show of fist-raising solidarity, stopped wearing her natural, Earth-friendly antiperspirant. (Just as well, the stuff cost nearly $18 for a little over 2 ounces compared to say Secret… something that even _Gerald_ before his fatal foray into foraging coulden't help but compare to her once having paid $20 each for a dozen organic apples over at Good Earth…)

AAAAAANYWAYYYYYY, by day three, both Rad and non-Rad students, who already shied away from Ms. Goode, now positively avoided her.

Helen didn't care, she was fighting the good fight. She even wore her "Natural is Good" ethically sourced hemp t-shirt to show the world she really meant it this time.

Finally, Officer Schmidt yanked the responsibly sourced third-world co-op woven rug out from under Helen's ethically produced hemp sandals and recycled 2L Coke bottle socks, when he'd called, "Yo." and walked over to where the two brothers stood in their almost visible cloud of naturalness, casually holding out two sticks of deodorant (It wasn't even organic!), saying: "Wear this, y'all. GIRLS love it!"

Obviously crushed by his deliberate racial and cultural insensitivity, the brothers stared at Officer Schmidt; their tiny yellow eyes beneath their heavy overhanging brows doubtlessly brimming with tears.

They then stared at what he offered in obvious horror, rattling and clicking their distress.

"Watch. If y'all do what I do – y'all won't be able to keep GIRLS off'a ya." Schmidt then had the NERVE to further shame the brothers by demonstrating how to apply the product of brutal subjugation right in front of EVERYONE!

WORSE, the two innocent brothers, obviously forced into humiliating submission by his white patriarchalism, TOOK THE DEODERANT from Officer Schmidt and USED IT right there in the hall under duress to the obviously forced applause of their obviously traumatized peers before swaggering away in a bourgeois cloud of Axe, exchanging high fives with everyone including Officer Schmidt but not Helen, who'd battled so hard on their behalf.

Schmidt, their vicious cultural oppressor, then calmly walked back to his office across from Helen's carpeted one with the window that overlooked the school flowerbed. After folding his huge frame behind his rickety little desk in the converted broom closet, Officer Schmidt went back to filling out the morning's incident reports, leaving Ms. Goode to stew in her own admittedly pungent juices over his insufferable patriarchal arrogance.

"Oh God, oh GOD!" temporarily forgetting her militant atheism, a hysterical Helen screamed half an hour later as she stared down at Mike's pale blood where it soaked her fair-trade blouse seconds after he deliberately stepped between her and the gunmen who'd shot their way through the locked front door of Merston and started spraying lead in a cloud of smoke, "How was I to know that being an oppressed minority isn't always obvious?"


	7. TRIGGER WARNING

_Salem, Oregon, Merston High, sometime after lunch, early September, 201-_

 **Masks**

Pausing to pull down the gas masks that Jimmy specially modified the night before, Jimmy and Dakota Spencer stood in front of the plate glass doors of Merston High's front entryway and raised their AR-15s on the count of three.

 _Having spent most of his short life doing little more than sleep in class or watch television while feeling that nobody gave him the respect he was owed, Jimmy Spencer was about to do something with his life._

 _Something... something awe inspiring: Jimmy Spencer was about to create a higher body count than that pussy, Adam Lanza._

 _At the school that had finally had enough and kicked him out._

 _Well, it would have, had he not dropped out first._

 _Glory: finally being noticed, respected, involved illegally acquiring fully automatic weapons, a nice assortment of grenades, fatigues, combat boots and gas masks – all on mom's credit card._

 _His cousin, Dakota, made a great wingman._

 _Because Dakota understood glory._

 _That, and Dakota had a car._

 _And let's be up front about it, Dakota was so dumb he'd go along with anything Jimmy cooked up even if it sometimes got him a week in the county jail while Jimmy walked._

 _That morning when he should have been working at McDonald's handing scalding hot cups of coffee and bags of Egg McWhatevers out the window to Mr. and Mrs. Boring America on their way to their dead end jobs, Jimmy and his cousin put final messages and carefully prepared manifestos on their Facebook pages, and then loaded Dakota's ratty little Chevy Cavalier with the stuff legends were made of that he'd been storing in the tool shed out back._

 _On the way they stopped at a 24-7 and changed into the fatigues, combat boots, and Kevlar vests that Jimmy bought online._

 _Finally, the world would notice them._

 _They'd march through the halls of Merston High hosing spraying live rounds just like they'd planned._

 _The girls that ignored Jimmy would go down._

 _The jocks that wedgied him, would go down._

 _And the Rads who fucked up the whole town, would go down first.  
_

A trigger squeeze, a short burst, and the glass shattered.

Bitchin'!

Jimmy Spencer pulled the pins on two tear gas grenades and rolled them into the hallway of the school just like in the YouTube video.

And in swirling clouds of tear gas, two cheap rubber masks, one of Dracula and one of Frankenstein as worn by two lame seekers of glory, strode into the building, alarms screaming, and the Doppler of doors slamming one after the other down the hall ahead of them.

 **Oh Shit**

Mike heard the crash of shattering glass and automatic weapons fire before he even had a chance to sit down and finish writing up the morning report.

Ms. Goode was still yattering at him through his open door, leaning in and around the frame so she could continue her rant about whatever the hell it was she was ranting about, something about deodorant and cultural appropriation.

That was when a low wave of acrid gas rolled past her Birkenstocks to the sound of screaming alarms and slamming doors.

Shit.

Not that.

Please, not that.

Unholstering his standard issue Glock with the trigger guard modified to accommodate his large hand, Mike grabbed Ms. Goode by the shoulder and pushed her to the floor as another burst of automatic weapons fire sizzled past, closer this time.

There was no time to radio in a request to return fire.

Shit.

Shit!

SHIT!

Mike peered around the door frame, using one foot to shove Ms. Goode who was now choking and crying from the gas that swirled around them in the red emergency lights further into the shelter of his tiny office.

Two gunmen: one rapidly trotting towards him armed with an AR-15, squeezing off random bursts at waist height, the other roughly fifteen feet behind, moving with faltering steps as if whoever it was might be having second thoughts.

With the first occupied classroom less than ten feet away.

Unable to see clearly, SRO Officer Mike Schmidt stepped out into the hallway, fired a round and took a burst in his police-issued Kevlar vest, rocking him back on his heels, a round punching between his eyes.

 **Outrage**

"You biyACH!" Maggie had done some pretty shitty things before, but sister or not, you didn't borrow Puck's old brown leather bomber just because it completed your "boyfriend look".

Not if you wanted to live

But Maggie had.

Because stealing is against the law even if it's your sister doing the stealing, Puck was dragging a protesting Maggie, who was wearing Puck's beloved jacket out of History I and down the hall towards Uncle Mike's little office when she heard the sound of gunfire followed by shattering glass and a strange, acrid stink.

Temporarily forgetting their beef, the two girls, cat and fox, dropped to the floor the way Uncle Mike had taught them, huddling together against a bank of lockers, hoping that whoever it was, wouldn't see them in the stinking fog.

 **Digging for Gold**

There are things in life that if done publicly, that will get you the adoration you deserve.

There are things in life that if done publicly, though satisfying, that will ruin your life.

Nose picking being the latter, Cleo de Nile, claiming she had to go in the middle of Advanced French, now had the girl's bathroom all to herself to probe to her ancient, fashionable heart's content in the solitude befitting a born royal.

Halfway through a really big dig, there was a noise, like breaking glass, and then the lights went out, followed by a horrible smell.

A nictophobe to the very bottoms of her pampered feet, Cleo held back her panic.

There were worse things than being alone in the dark.

Getting shot, if the noisen that now filtered in through the thick bathroom door, was one of them.

Eyes streaming, Cleo de Nile stumbled through the terrifying blackness, groped her way into a stall, slammed and locked the door behind her, and shuddering, took refuge on top of one of the porcelain thrones, trying not to cough and give herself away.


	8. ANOTHER TRIGGER WARNING

_Salem, Oregon, Merston High, sometime after lunch, early September, 201-_

 **Officer down?**

Near-blinded by tear gas and a bullet punching through the network controlling his vision and stuck in an open hallway no cover, Officer Schmidt rocked back on his heels as another burst slammed into him.

He caught his balance, internal gyros straining to keep him upright as still another burst zinged past, taking his right ear with it, releasing the synthetic ligaments and tendons which held that half of his face in place so that it sagged grotesquely before falling away, revealing his titanium skull.

As he strained forward, a fourth burst punched through his chest, clipping the internal system that controlled the left side of his body as well as the tightly rolled bundle of documents he'd stashed there when he and his family fled what had once been _Circus Baby's._

Another round hit him in the lower thorax.

Ignoring the pain as internal alarms signaled imminent mandatory shutdown due to breaches in structural integrity, Mike continued his ponderous lurch forward, hoping he'd hold together long enough to make sure they didn't.

 **Oh shit.**

What came at Jimmy out of the chemical smoke from the grenades he'd tossed not two minutes before through the front door of Merston High was NOT part of the plan, the plan that would make Jimmy Spenser famous, immortal.

Jimmy fired.

The big cop rocked back on his heels.

Jimmy fired again.

The cop paused, a hole appearing between his eyes, shook his head, and continued moving towards Jimmy.

On the verge of shitting himself, Jimmy squeezed off a third burst, uncontrolled shots spraying wildly over the cop's shoulder.

The cop's ear disappeared, leaving behind a bloodless wound, one half of his face flopping away, revealing a shiny metal skull that grinned down at Jimmy as the cop's body lumbered towards him.

"Shit. Oh shit. Oh shit-shit-shit! This isn't how it was supposed to work - what do I do now?" Jimmy wailed as he fled backwards, only to stumble over a body hidden by the smoke with what he'd seconds before mistaken as an easily mown down cop moving steadily towards him.

Tangled in the lanyard that held his AR-15 within easy reach, Jimmy landed on his back, and after fumbling, fired again.

The giant rocked, paused, shook its gleaming head, and came at him again, grinning down at Jimmy with razor blades where a few seconds before Jimmy could have sworn there had been white human teeth as a woman's voice announced calmly, "This unit belongs to Fazcorp and has been damaged. To avoid prosecution, please return it to the nearest authorized service provider."

Jimmy fired once more, only the magazine was empty as he scrambled clumsily to his feet on the wet tiles, only to howl when the Glock went off and his left leg buckled under him. Tossing aside the empty AR-15, all dreams of Internet fame forgotten, Jimmy turned and attempted to flee.

"This unit belongs to Fazcorp and has been damaged. To avoid prosecution, please return it to the nearest authorized service provider."

The Glock went off again, this time hitting Jimmy's shoulder where his generic Kevlar vest gapped, spinning him so that his mask fell off. Dimly he heard the sound of Dakota squeezing off another round so close he could feel the displaced air of the bullets as they whipped past him.

"This unit belongs to Fazcorp and has been damaged. To avoid prosecution, please return it to the nearest authorized service provider."

Screaming, right arm flopping, a limping Jimmy evaded the lumbering terror behind him as it dropped the Glock, hands swinging back and forth, swiveling head with rolling blank eyes above a mouth where the jaw flapped pointlessly open and shut, only to trip over his dropped AR-15.

"This unit belongs to Fazcorp and has been damaged. To avoid prosecution, please return it to the nearest authorized service provider."

The last thing Jimmy experienced wasn't so much the triumph of having been the school shooter with the highest body count in history, but the sudden impact of a body that massed roughly of that of a U.S. vending machine filled to capacity with Coca-Cola products.

 **Oh shit, part deux.**

Dakota, never the brightest bulb in any light fixture, had gone along with his older cousin's plans for glory as a matter of course.

Hell, Dakota would have gone along with them had they not amounted to more than say, a trip to the nearest 24-7 to shoplift cigarettes and beer while Jimmy distracted the fat, red haired clerk with the thick glasses and ugly kid.

But he hadn't signed up for this.

Hurling his AR-15 aside with a shriek, his now thoroughly crushed cousin's blood on his boots creating a trail of bloody footprints towards the violated door he'd helped violate less than ten minutes before, Dakota fled squealing out the remains of one of the front doors, only to slam into someone.

"Go to sleep." a genderless voice whispered softly in his ear as something sliced effortlessly through Dakota's cool Kevlar vest so that the contents of his lower abdomen spilled out on the sidewalk in front of the school like so much dropped Jell-O salad before the pain could register.

The last thing Dakota witnessed was someone wearing a stained white hoodie casually walking away as the sidewalk rose to meet his face.

 **Jeff, once more.**

Jeff walked away, the heavy-duty box cutter he'd just used on Dakota secreted back somewhere in his hoodie.

All in all, he thought, pausing to drip artificial tears into his lidless eyes, it had been a pretty good day for a Monday.


	9. Aftermath

_Salem, Oregon, Merston High, sometime after lunch, early September, 201-_

 **Officer Down**

Blind and deaf, Mike lay face down in the hall, reality fading in and out for what seemed like forever before fumbling at his shoulder mounted radio, silent internal alarms going off as his central processors frantically routed and rerouted to no avail.

"Officer down." He mumbled in the end stages of catastrophic situational shutdown as the Maze, which had been hovering around him all morning, swooped down, attempting to enfold him as his central processors gave up and blue-screened.

 **Perspective**

The Sargent brothers rippled into sight where they'd stood watching from the sidelines the entire time.

That had been… epic. Not, epic, but EPIC! Did you see how he? And then he! Rattle, rattle rattle, etc.

Though strongly tempted to join in, they'd remembered the good manners their mother had pounded into them since birth: "Little pups who poke their pokey-pokey mandibles into someone else's honor battle uninvited are being very, very RUDE. Watch and applaud‑ but _stay out of it."_

So they had.

Rattling their mandibles with awestruck applause, they approached Mike's body. The exciting, fast-paced battle had taken under five ooman minutes, ending when Officer Schmidt, who had given both youths a magic potion to help them attract GIRLS, had taken out two smaller, faster, better armed challengers. Finishing off the better armed one by crushing him with his own body had been fo' shizzle!

As to Officer Schmidt's sending the smaller one bleating in terror before eviscerating him from a distance? Double-double shizzle!

Reverently they knelt on either side of Mike's body, debating back and forth between them the best way of showing their respect and admiration for what they'd just witnessed while worshipfully dipping trembling talons in Mike's blood, dotting each other between the eyes with it. Fredator was already composing a three-hour memorial epic in Mike's memory in his head, complete with appropriate mandible rattles, victory roars, and the occasional bit of ambient sound as needed.

That, and epic hand movements. A proper memorial battle epic was incomplete without epic hand movements, with the whole thing be sung at anyone who would listen.

In Yautja, of course. Yautja was sooooooo much more expressive than English; Officer Schmidt deserved the best.

Kicking thoughtfully at Jimmy and then Dakota's bodies, the twins rippled out of sight, the wail of rapidly approaching sirens filling the air, leaving beside Mike's body two reverently placed funeral gifts: Fredator's copy of _Hamlet_ as autographed by Kenneth Branagh he'd won off of ebay, and a freshly killed football from Tedator.

 **Predatory Barbie**

Postal vehicle pulled over in a parking lot for his morning raw hamburger, doughnut, and coffee break, Mr. Sargent looked up, mild interest on his broad face. He then leaned over and delicately turned up the little radio in the middle of the dash.

There had been an incident over at the school.

Armed combat. His dreads stirred with excitement before relaxing dismissively: the wife would take care of it, and the boys would sing to him all about it once they got home.

Pat then went back to carefully epoxying a pair of mandibles harvested from an extremely large beetle onto the lower half of a fully jointed Ballerina Barbie's face.

Barbie's blonde tresses had been carefully dreaded and beaded (that had been the hardest part), her eyes painted a fetching yellow, and her unbelievably pink skin spray-painted a wholesome, pale green. In a moment of pure inspiration, he'd added darker spatters to make it cuter. But there was nothing he could really do about Barbie's absurdly large breasts and tiny feet.

Bizarre proportions aside, Patator knew little Ruby would love it, especially after he finished the tiny spear, burner, throwing stars, and shoulder mounted laser cannon that he'd improvised from a laser pointer for added realism.

It would go great with the bright pink body armor.

 **La Cucaracha**

In a mingled blast of cheap beer and compost heap, Joe, Tina's short, flat father slowly eased himself out from between two lockers where he'd secreted himself the second Jimmy shot out the front doors and reinflated himself. Antannae waving, he scuttled down the hallway on all sixes in search of his daughter.

Their genus in one form or another could survive just about anything thrown at them; Jimmy Spencer and his cousin? No problem, boss, no problem.

 **Life Skills 101**

As for Tina, Tina had swept five of her classmates under her armored body and hunkered down over them in the middle of Ghoulia Yelp's seemingly endless "Budgets, Why Do I Need One?" presentation, snagging a panicking Draculaura by the skirt before shoving the little vampire under her head frill and then clamping the whole works down the second she'd heard gunfire, something her mother had learned living in L.A.'s Rancho San Pedro.

There was a burst of static from the P.A., followed by: "…all students and staff are directed to the rear exits of the campus complex and are to gather in the parking lot until dismissed."

Luckily, she'd not have to buff bullet scuffs from her carapace with sandpaper tonight after she'd finished her homework and put Marlys to bed. Whatever just happened, hadn't got as far as the Life Skills room.

"Medical assistance will be provided as needed."

Raising her head frill, Tina cautiously stood upright, sending Draculaura tumbling onto her friends with a startled whoop as they crawled out from under her.

"All classes have been canceled until further notice."

 **Dethroned**

"Daddy!" Cleo de Nile, forgetting her usual carefully cultivated disdain for everything except herself, ran crying across the back parking lot with her arms held out as Rameses de Nile, her father, got out of his antique Rolls Royce Silver Ghost before his driver could park it safely among the milling students and faculty.

 **No One Gets Left Behind**

Leaning against each other, Maggie and Puck started pulling themselves to their feet and froze.

Mike lay face down in a pool of bright red blood that wasn't his, tear gas from Jimmy Spenser's grenades dissipating around him.

The two girls counted to three together and rolled him over, dislodging a book and a deflated football like the ones filling the two garbage cans by their front door back home.

Wow, it was worse then they thought.

The two locked eyes over their uncle's body, and nodded.

Exactly as Mike had taught them to do whenever one of them had been incapacitated, the animatronic sisters attempted to pull the rest of him as well as themselves into the nearby lurking Maze and relative safety, the sound of a helicopter echoing down the hall around them.


	10. Meanwhile on the outskirts of town

_Salem, Oregon, September 201-_

 **The Hunt**

The Prey was now less than ten yards ahead of her. Excellent! It had been an exciting chase through the trailer park maze - Officer Sargent couldn't wait to consummate the Hunt!

Panting, the frantic ooman jinked right, and then went left between two double-wides sagging lopsidely on their foundations, before vaulting over a broken BBQ pit only to trip over a tricycle, going down hard.

Dreads flying, Officer Sargent came to a full stop, pulled out the iPad holstered at her waist, holding it at chest height while striding in for the kill. Raising a pair of castanets, small goatskin drum and bone whistle within easy reach, the African looking woman in a bright headscarf on the little screen cleared her throat, ready to translate Yautja into Gciriku, the closest human language to Yautja, before translating _that_ into North American standard English out loud.

It had been tough for M'Binte to find an equivalent for: "Do you know how fast you were driving?" and "This is a one-way street. That's why I just gave you that ticket!" in an African language which had developed by a hunter/gatherer society in a part of the world where cars and paved streets were very, very rare, but she'd managed and was now well on her way towards a second Ph.D by compiling the world's first Yautja-Geiriku-English dictionary, thanks to U.S. accommodation laws.

Leaning over the cowering Prey, Officer Sargent clattered her mandibles, emitting a piercing whistle that made anybody within hearing distance's back teeth vibrate.

Whimpering in terror, Sargent's Prey rapidly scooted back on his elbows through the weeds and pea gravel.

M'binte tensed, quickley consulted her notes, and then relaxed, saying in a light, pleasant voice, "Thank you for the exhilarating chase."

Officer Sargent handed the Prey a white, official-looking envelope.

The Prey took it from her with one violently trembling hand.

Clattering and hooting, Officer Sargent politely held out a clipboard and pen.

M'Binte said, "Sign here, please. Have a nice day!"

Officer Sargent, last subpoena of the morning delivered, strode towards the modified king cab pickup with the front seats removed that she'd been assigned as a Patrol car, sliding the iPad back into its holster as M'binte took a coffee break in her little UCLA Berkeley office. Sargent had no idea why everybody else in Salem's police department hated delivering subpoenas - it was FUN!

(Especially when they ran away!)

"Active Shooter Situation" crackled over her body-mounted radio, followed by an address. M'binte quickly swallowed the last of her coffee and translated by rattling the castanets with one hand while slapping the goatskin drum with the other and at the same time blowing hard on the toy wooden train whistle she kept on a string around her neck within easy reach. Feet in steel-toed work boots for resonance, she kicked an empty metal wastebasket across the room so that it hit the wall across the hall outside her door across with a reverberating clang.

Sargent's casual loping stride abruptly turned into a sprint.

A few seconds later, the patrol truck shot out of the trailer park and onto the highway in the direction of Merston High School, lights flashing and siren wailing.

 **Raina**

Still on the landing pad at Salem Hospital after helicoptering in a traffic accident victim, Raina's dispatcher directed her to a new location.

No big deal.

It happens.

It wasn't until she was halfway to the new destination that she realized that she was being sent to Merston High.


	11. Hitting the Fan

_Merston High School, Salem, Oregon, September 201-_

 **Abscond**

"Hurry, Maggie, we've got to get him, us, out of here!" Puck exclaimed as the two sisters, each grabbed one of Mike's legs after rolling him over, "Get him into the Maze like he told us to whenever the shit hits the fan!"

"OMG! He's even heavier than when he was a bear!" Maggie shifted her grip, accidentally yanking off one of her uncle's shoes and socks, revealing one of his toeless feet. "But we can't fix him this time!"

"Shut the fuck up! We'll figure something out once we get out of here. Goddammit, quit whining and _pull!"_ Puck was all but screaming by the time she'd reached "pull!", remembering Jax, her first adoptive father's face in the coffin.

 _Jax the retired Navy SEAL who didn't insist she be girly. Jax who ran along beside her when things became overwhelming until she'd calmed herself down while not making a big deal of it._

 _Jax who'd been left for dead like dog on the side of the road by a hit and run driver while he was out on one of his casual five-mile morning runs._

 _Jax who had approved of her._

 _Jax, who she hadn't been able to save._

The Maze was close, Puck could feel it – what made Mike walk and talk had hopefully gone in ahead of them – they just had to follow.

Please, please, Puck begged silently as Mike's inert frame, lubricated by Dakota's blood, ponderously slid down the hall behind them away from the front door and its sirens, finishing out loud under her breath, "Don't leave us here, 'k?"

 _Orville, her second adoptive father had been too pussywhipped by Kathy, his high-powered lawyer wife, so Puck ran away without looking back one night, a bottle of sleeping pills stolen from Kathy's bedside table rattling in her bomber jacket pocket, looking for Maggie for one last "fuck you" and "goodbye"._

 _After murdering Mike, Mike picked up where Jax had left off. Though he'd decided to stay in this piss-ant of a town with it's confusing rules and even more confusing people, Puck stayed with him because Mike was the closest thing to a father she'd ever had after Jax._

"God dammit, Mags, you're not doing your share!" Puck exclaimed, the Maze tauntingly just out of reach.

"But he's HEAVY!" Maggie moaned, shifting her grip on Mike.

Servos whining as she steered Mike's body around Ms. Goode, Puck's fully mechanical body hidden beneath baggy clothing began to give off a hot electrical smell. "Mags, call the Maze. I can feel it, but it's being an asshole!"

"No!" Maggie wailed, "You know I can't! It only listens to you, Mike, and sometimes Raina— and _she's not here!"_

 **Different P.O.V.**

"The battle must have been _glorious!"_ Officer Sargent clattered to herself as she pulled up beside the ambulance and the fire truck already parked in front of the high school. Effective, too, according to Fred and Ted's wildly enthusiastic report through their breathing masks during her fast ride over here: the Herd was unharmed.

Stepping over the body on the front sidewalk, Sargent allowed herself a few seconds of blushing maternal pride. Having witnessed the entire battle from a respectful distance as was proper, the two pups were already composing Officer Schmidt's Death Chant and couldn't wait to recite it to the rest of the family after work tonight - such _GOOD_ boys!

Accurate, too, from what M'Binte rapidly translated earlier for Sargent as information from official sources came in over her shoulder-mounted radio. Schmidt had gone down fighting taking the two dishonorable thieves with him; all that was left was to collect the bodies and clean up the mess so the Herd could continue undisturbed.

Sargent hoped she'd be allowed the honor of returning Herder Schmidt along with his trophies (Herder = the closest word to "cop" the Yautja language has.) to his clan for a proper sky burial and memorial feast.

Only she was too late, Sargent realized as she worked her way cautiously through the unsecured crime scene, Somebody was already stealing Schmidt's body.

The senior Clan matriarch unholstered her issued sidearm and then the iPad – oomans had their own ways of doing things; M'Binte would help her with that part – ritual was everything, even when it made no sense. Automatically scanning the honor thieves through her mask's targeting system, she gave a short, curt rattle of her mandibles, along with a high-pitched trill.

 **Great. Now what?**

There was a rattling trill behind them.

Startled, Puck looked up, the Maze retreating further out of reach.

Face hidden by a dull silver mask, someone who looked an awful lot like Fred or Ted only a whole hell of a lot bigger was approaching them, holding out a pistol and an iPad, "Freeze!" Said the black woman wearing a colorful headscarf on the brightly lit screen. Lips moving silently while looking down at a piece of paper, she then looked up, adding pleasantly, "Or I will shoot."


	12. Tea and the September Moon

_Merston High School, Salem, Oregon, September 201-_

 **Crazy Train…**

"Allllllllll abooaaaarrrrddddddd! (Ha-ha-ha!)"

Steel claws out, Puck launched herself at Officer Sargent, the sound of her favorite battle song blasting out from her internal speakers. Jax had been taken from her, she'd be damned if it happened a second time with Mike.

Mike picked up where Jax left off in teaching her how to fight. She'd always relied on surprise – a real opponent who knew what they were doing would figure this out fast and flatten her in spite of her titanium frame – Mike'd been drunk at the time she, Maggie, and Vinnie had murdered him; drunk and wanting to die.

So, yellow rabbit watching, they'd obliged.

But when what was left of him rose the next night, angry and insane, Mike took her on a second time, leaving her in pieces all over _Circus Baby's Pizza World_ along with Maggie and her asshole boyfriend within seconds, their heads contemptuously left displayed on the front counter among the plushies for the morning custodian to find.

Reassembled, Maggie fled into the air-conditioning ducts, taking Vinnie with her. Puck stood her ground; demanding Mike show her everything he knew.

What had once been a man happily obliged, figuring out fast that Puck had no sense of physical rhythm or timing, teaching her how to box to music, 4/4 time, casually adding Ju Jitsu, karate, and others as she improved, demanding he show her more, dragging Maggie and Vinnie out of hiding and pounding it into them in turn, relishing Maggie's whining and Vinnie's hitting the tiles time after time.

"Crazy, but that's how it goes." Good ol' Ozzy and his crazy train, he understood.

"Mental wounds not healing," Puck ricocheted off of a bank of lockers, taking half of the cop's dreads with her on her way past, landing on Mike's torso, using it to launch herself at the cop who lunged at her, "Life's a bitter shame, I'm goin' off the rails on a crazy train..."

It felt good, fighting back, after months of insults, of Maggie betraying her… of everyone betraying her… this whole piss ant town that made nice-nice to your face… while stabbing you in the back…

"…I'm goin' off the rails on a crazy train!"

 **1,2,3,4**

Puck's traditional challenge was unexpected. But what did you expect from unpredictable oomans?

In a blur Sargent re-holstered her ooman sidearm and the iPad as her cut dreads pattered heavily to the tiles, casually blocking Puck with one arm, non-regulation spring loaded wrist blades engaging with a flick of the other, snagging the maiden's clothing, breaking her trajectory so that she landed on the floor on all fours to scoot between Sargent's legs, coming on the other side before scrambling up the Matriarch's back, using Sargent's duty belt and Kevlar vest for leverage, clawed hands and feet shredding the black uniform shirt beneath as the tough body armor gave way, lightening Sargent's load.

Sargent grabbed Puck by the back of her baggy shirt, easily tossing her down the school hallway – scanning her small attacker through her breathing mask: mostly titanium, with a head that was organic encased in the same light, tough metal – all built for speed and balance.

Exhilarated, Sargent let Puck charge, catching her by the ankles as she sliced past, spinning her so that she landed on her back, skidding across the slick, water and blood-stained tiles.

 **Goin' off the rails…**

1-2-3-4. Tail lashing free of her loose sweat pants, Puck flipped herself upright, hissing, internal gyros straining as they steadied her. She feinted a swing, and leapt, landing solidly on the torso of the big cop, who rocked, nearly toppling over backwards, catching himself on the palm of one huge hand on the same surface, using it to launch himself upright.

1-2-3-4.

This was easy, too easy. Puck cartwheeled, flipping past the cop's silver breathing mask, steel claws tagging the dull metallic surface.

1-2-3-4.

 _Take this for hitting me with one set of rules for you and another for me!_

1-2-3-4.

 _Take this, for trying to take one of the few things I've ever loved away from me!_

1-2-3-4.

 _How about a little bit of this for turning my sister against me? And a little of this? And a little more of thi…_ oh shit.

1-2-3-4…5?

Rhythm broken, Puck felt herself being sliced in half and then pulled apart joint by joint as Officer Sargent, tired of sparring and with a job to do, used the recording loop built into her twin wrist knife mount, blasted out confusing beat of her own, disrupting Puck's flow.

"I'm sorry! I'm sorry! I didn't mean to let you down, Uncle Mike!" was Puck's last thought as Officer Sargent casually pulled her head off her shoulders and the world went dark, the Maze finally sweeping up what kept her moving protectively.

 **Father Tom**

Across town in front of the altar of Queen of Peace, a kneeling Father Tom switched off the little radio that he'd taken with him from his office.

He'd been listening to the news on NPR with half an ear while going over the upcoming holiday season Mass schedule when a report of an active shooter situation at one of Salem's high schools had broken in, interrupting the morning stock report.

As Father Tom began the Apostles Creed for the third time, the local announcer went silent. She then announced that somehow the SRO had fought back, going down in the process, taking the shooters with him before they could reach the classrooms.

Contemplating this, Father Tom finished the Rosary, and began a fourth.

Whoever the SRO officer was, Catholic or not, he or she, had his gratitude.

 **In the shadows**

Pen set aside, Vlad Tepes, uncrowned king of the monsters, no _RADS_ , sat in his dimly lit office, unblinking eyes hooded, chin on steepled fingers, listening to the events at his daughter's school unfold.

He had been correct in his insistence that the new SRO at Marston High be one of them. Schmidt, by his own admission, was a monster.

A big one.

But when dealing with monsters, you had to put a bigger monster on the chess board.

And the normies, well the _normies_ never saw it coming.

Dismissively, Tepes shut off the radio from the console built into his huge mahogany desk, and in the silence went back to writing out the upcoming year's projected profits in longhand.

Draculaura would undoubtedly tell him all about it this evening during breakfast over her tomato juice and his steak tartare.

With pickled garlic on the side.

Pickled garlic always added to the interest of the experience.

 **Behind Bars**

Charlie looked up from where she'd been loading dishes into the big industrial dishwasher in time to see Mike's face, or someone who looked an awful lot like Mike, flash across the screen of the big tv in the FPC Alderson dining hall.

Getting nailed for income tax evasion right after declaring Fazcorp's bankruptcy had been one more insult added to injury.

It was her money. Why should she have to hand a big chunk of it over to Uncle Sam to pay for social welfare programs that were a waste? Give the poor money and free housing and what did they do with it? Tear up that free housing and then spend the money on $300 sneakers and fake nails while screaming about the unfairness of it all when hard working business women like Charlie had to claw for everything they got so that a bunch of unemployable ingrates didn't have to earn their keep, that's what!

Uncle Sam, obviously disagreed.

So, here she was, somewhere in Buttfuck, WVA, washing dishes in the same Federal facility Martha Stewart had once cooled her heels for insider trading.

Charlie slammed the door of the dishwasher shut, staring out through the serving hatch at the face on the big screen and all the big whoop-whoop about yet another boring school shooting.

Yep, that was Mike, all right.

 **Somewhere in the English Countryside**

Vaguely amused, the dark-haired man, tall, spare, fluidly graceful, sat watching the flatscreen that took up nearly an entire wall in his master's bedroom.

It was amusing how fast news traveled these days.

So fast that the antics of the obviously mentally ill, armed with weapons they had no business owning, could literally, in the blink of an eye, have their mediocre lives splashed all over the globe.

In seconds.

As well as the inevitable ritual garment-rending and fruitless opinion spouting that inevitably followed. To be eclipsed by the next set of stupidly vicious antics as performed by still another equally mediocre, but miserable life badly wanting to be noticed as painted in blood.

"Show me, sinners, show me something _new._ Your lack of originality ceases to amuse... Ahhh, But _this_ …" The tall man leaned forward, a thin grin all but splitting his near-angelic visage, "… _this,_ is interesting!"

The face that flashed across the screen, blonde, younger than it should be, was familiar.

All the way down to the intense blue eyes and near-unnatural perfect symmetry, marred by a broken nose, an old injury.

"Interesting, indeed!"

The owner of that face in the shape of an absurd, cartoon bear and four other equally absurd toys, the dark haired man's master's property, had eluded the dark-haired man for two years.

Amused, the dark-haired man leaned back, resting his pointed chin in one narrow long-fingered hand – he nearly caught them twice, only to have them bolt into a pocket dimension both times before he could claim them for his master.

And it had all been, _very amusing._

Perhaps, it was time to book a flight to, where was it? Ah, Oregon.

Salem.

After all, three's a charm.

The tall, dark-haired man smiled faintly, eyes glittering red. The leaves there were quite spectacular this time of year, as was the full moon, with the snow just starting to dust the peaks of the Cascades.

He would make sure Tanaka packed the correct rice cakes, tea, and cups for their observation and enjoyment.


	13. Sort of a Love Story

_Mike's Meadow, The Maze, wherever, 201-_

Puck opened her eyes when a hot wind smelling of new mown hay curled itself around her to the sound of an old tractor putt-putting itself back and forth in the distance.

There was a clattering like steel teeth, and the tractor left behind a freshly cut swathe of tall grass and wildflowers, methodically working its way towards her across Mike's meadow, Uncle Mike at the wheel in a work shirt with the sleeves missing and a patched pair of overalls, a faded feed cap on his head, and an unlit cigarette behind one ear.

As the elderly tractor, a battered green John Deere 1949 Model R approached, Uncle Mike downshifted, slowing just enough for Puck to catch the sun-warmed metal of one of the back fenders and vault onto the running board so that she stood, leaning back on his knee, feeling the hot dry sun of a Missouri Bootheel July afternoon on her face.

This wasn't Puck's memory, but Mike's.

Inner city brat that she was, Puck loved it here – Uncle Mike kept the hay meadow of the farm he'd grown up on alive – the real thing was long gone. An uncle of his had sold it for a fat profit, pocketing the cash the Missouri Department of Transportation had given him for the property when it should have gone to Mike's grandmother as promised and then Mike after her death if there was anything left. Only Uncle Mike had been fourteen at the time and didn't know he'd been screwed out of the only home he'd ever known and great granny'd been so busy taking care of great grannddad after his stroke that she didn't think to ask until it was too late to realize what she'd signed away.

Had things gone better, and if Mr. Stein was right about Puck and Maggie, this place would have been Puck and Maggie's after Uncle Mike if things hadn't been so fucked up.

But not if he'd lived long enough to have kids with Aunt Raina the way he'd wanted to so bad.

(And if it hadn't wound up under a whole lotta I-55.)

Not that Puck knew anything about farming. She'd let the place go back to the animals and the swamps, and the tall, tall grass. Maggie would stay in L.A. painting her fingernails and perming her ear fuzz, and Puck would sink into the earth like the rest of the Schmidts.

That is, if she really _was_ a Schmidt.

Uncle Mike had one night grabbed her by the back of the neck when they were on the run, scooped up a massive pawful of dirt from the side of I-55 in between hitchiking rides, and dumped it over her head, laughing, saying, "There, close enough. Now you're a Schmidt – I leave you exactly everything I ever done owned – hope you got room in one of your bomber jacket pockets for it when I go for good!"

Had Puck, with her metal and plastic body, been physically capable at the time she would have burst into tears.

The tractor's gears ground, slowing. Puck looked up at Mike, sun glinting off that weird red stubble on his chin where it should have been blonde. He grinned down at her, older looking than his new body was, sun wrinkles on the back of his neck and at the corner of his eyes as the elderly tractor ground its way towards the small farm pond and the little wooden dock that stuck out towards the middle of it, rabbits, quail, a deer, and a few of the last of the ghost children that Mike when he'd been crazy had gathered in from everywhere for company scattering through the grass, wildflowers, and now reeds, coming to a sputtering, rattling halt, the now still engine clicking and popping as it cooled, the sound of insects a hypnotic hum against the slow waves of tall grass where once there had been sea.

He climbed down, huge earth-caked work boots clattering against the metal, and pulled a tackle box, a coffee can of worms, and two fishing poles out from under the hard metal seat of the old John Deere, and with that long-legged, loose-limbed stride of his, sauntered towards the little pond, only pausing to light up the cigarette he'd stashed behind one ear one handedly with an old steel lighter.

"You comin' or you gonna stand there all day 'tractin' flies?" was all he said around the ciggie as trailing smoke he turned back towards the pond, heavy tread echoing on the weathered boards.

Puck jumped down, and scampered after him, unconsciously imitating his stride, tail twitching, a real tail in the Maze, in Mike's meadow.

Uncle Mike'd already baited and cast a line by the time she sat down beside him. He handed her the other pole and then slapped his pack of Marlboros across her open palm, followed by the lighter, grumbling, "You know your Aunt Raina's gonna have a FIT if she ever catches you smokin' and that I was the one who done gave 'em to you?"

"None of this is real, and I don't have any lungs. Why should she give a shit?"

"It's her job."

"Why do you put up with her?"

"Why do I put up with you?"

Good question.

They sat side by side, Puck's feet in the water, for what felt like forever. "Uncle Mike, tell me about the time you met my bitch of a mom?"

"What," Uncle Mike paused to light up another Marlboro, "That again? How many times I tell you that one?"

"Dunno, I just like hearin' it."

"Suit y'self." Uncle Mike leaned forward, pointed out a Belted Kingfisher high on a willow branch before taking a deep drag on the Marlboro, saying. "I was right off Parris Island, dumb as a post. When I'd enlisted in the Corps, they told me during a background check I had me a half-sister somewhere in L.A. that I'd never done heard of – ma was a slut, you know that?"

Puck, having heard the story of how her grandmother had been found naked and dead on the side of a highway on the edge of St. Louis, nodded.

"I was excited – I wanted to meet her, family is family, even when they don't want you. I thought, "Maybe she won't care, and that's enough for me." Mike adjusted his reel, causing the bobber to jerk across the water just a little bit. He frowned, eyes shadowed by the frayed bill of his feed cap. There was something in the water that didn't belong there.

"So after you got out of Basic, you went lookin' for her."

"Right. Right." He said absently, squinting against the sun dazzle on the water. It was gone. Maybe it had been his imagination, but the Maze, even if it was part of him, was a funny place. "So I find her in the phone book, thinkin' "Maybe if we start slow, I'll have somebody." I'd heard kids in the background when she picked up – which meant I had a whole bunch of family I never even knew I had! Family who'd want me around because they hadn't heard what my asshole uncle had said 'bout me bein' violent and disrespectful when all I was doin' was defendin' myself when he did what he did to me - or tried to."

Puck bummed another cigarette, "Those were my little brothers and sisters – mom was a slut. Me too, if I'd lived. It's a family tradition."

"Now, hey, there! Don't be talkin' that way about my favorite niece! You do that again, I'll open a can a whoop-ass on you!" Uncle Mike, eyes focused past the end of his fishing rod absently swatted at Puck, who ducked, saying, "Big liar, I bet you say that all the time to Maggie!"

"No. I don't. Maggie's an all right little girl, but I think she takes after your ma more than you do."

"Thank God for that." Puck grumbled, "Go on! Go on!"

"I've told you this a dozen times.

"Well, make it thirteen times, then!"

"Whatever." Mike smirked sideways at Puck. There it was again, a face with a gash for a mouth, just beneath the surface, watching them. "Anyways, dumb as a post me, in my new dress blues—"

"'Cause that's all you had!" Maggie interrupted.

"Now, hey there! Whose story is this anyway?" Mike exclaimed in mock irritation.

"Yours. But I know most of it already."

"Quiet, babydoll! Let a man tell his story."

"Whaaaat-everrrrrr!"

"So I get there, and it's public housing. The place is a god-damned filthy mess, dirty diapers, kids, broken toys, and she's as big as a fuckin' house – took up the whole goddam couch! I thought I had the wrong address – and some sort of boyfriend in nothin' but his skivvies hoggin' the tv with more little kids than I'd ever seen in one place swarmin' 'round him like piglets in a feedlot! And the _smell?_ GOD- _DAMN!"_

"Yep, that's mom, all right." The two locked eyes and shrugged.

Uncle Mike continued. "So here's me sittin there on a broken chair in my dress blues with kids of all differen't shades crawlin' 'round me, an' a dog or six shittin' on the' floor an' some of the kids, too. The whole time she's suckin' on a joint, yammerin' at me how hard life is, and as we were family, she needed money because Luis, her fiancé sittin' on his ass watchin' _Judge Judy_ right there needed money to buy a car so he could get his self-respect back, and she didn't have no money to give him, seein' as all them babies used up her welfare check, and th' tv's not big enough, and 'cause I was rich I should go get them all McDonald's and order a big pizza and then maybe sign over my Corps paycheck to her. Or at least take some of them kids off of her hands 'cause she had another set of twins on the way and done ran out of room and by the way, when would I sign 'em all up includin' Luis who had a bad back, for Tricare?"

"Oh yeah, that's mom, all right! Did you know I once hit Luis over the head with a glass ash tray when he grabbed Maggie's ass and pulled up her skirt?"

"You done told me that, now, how many times? Thirteen!"

"We thought we'd killed him, so we put him in the dumpster with the rest of the trash – should have heard him yell when the trash man found him a day later on pickup day!"

Mike eyeballed Puck, "Can't say as I blame you."

"Bad back my ass! He chased us down the street and beat the shit out of both of us with his belt for it when he caught us. And the kids?"

"Didn't know 'bout Luis hittin' you. Woulda killed him myself if I did, on the spot - th' trash man never would'a found th' body. Then I would'a taken every last one of them kids if I'd had a place to put 'em – nobody deserves that." Uncle Mike stated flatly, "Only when all you got to your name is a set of dog-tags, a duffel bag, and a pair of combat boots, where the hell you gonna put all them kids? Who do I look like, Angelina Jolie?"

"Brad Pitt, if I close my eyes and wished upon a star – hey!" Puck ducked when Mike swatted at her, eyes still on the water. Her gaze followed his, but saw nothing. Whatever it was that Uncle Mike was watching, she didn't see it. "If you'd known, would have taken me and Maggie away?"

"In a heartbeat, babydoll, in a heartbeat." He slugged her on the arm.

"Ow! Only, you ran away, only to find that you were missing your wallet and your watch, so you called CPS on mom, didn't you? What a shitshow that was!"

"Guilty as charged." Mike shrugged, "I'd do it again in a heartbeat." There it was again, a pale face just beneath the surface, surrounded by strands of red… or was it black? He flicked a cigarette butt at it.

The gash of a mouth gaped wider.

"And Aunt Raina? If you'd have brought us home with you, she would'a been PISSED!"

"I met her later, a lot later. After 'Storm I."

"And you put up with her because?"

"'Cause, babydoll, she was the first thing to come along in a long time that loved me back without wantin' anything outta me... that, and she had a great ass – still does!" The bobber at the end of Uncle Mike's line suddenly ducked under the water.

Only Uncle Mike wasn't paying attention, his eyes suddenly blank, mouth moving mechanically, saying, "I blew it again, didn't I Raina?"


	14. Cleanup

_Salem, Oregon, September 201-_

 **Body Bag**

"I blew it again, didn't I Raina?"

Raina nodded, peeling back the remains of the body bag the coroner's assistants had somehow managed to shoehorn Mike into. Being just over seven feet tall, his feet had ruptured the bottom of the bag.

She then changed her mind and shook her head.

Only to change her mind again, and nodded …and then finally…

Shrugged.

Mike's eyes rolled up to meet hers from where his head now rested on her lap where she sat in the open doorway of the air-ambulance she'd landed on the Merston High School football field at the height of the active shooter situation for obvious reasons.

"Well, aside from your niece being torn to pieces by Officer, what was his—

"Her." Mike said firmly, "Officer Sargent is a "her". That's what they told us at the diversity briefing when they transferred her out of Traffic."

"Yeah. Right. Sargent." Raina gave Mike a puzzled frown, "Ummmmm… any first name?"

"Nope. Just Sargent. I looked on the duty roster."

"Anyway, when they brought you out in that body bag, I thought you'd really done it this time until they started to try loading you into the coroner's meat wagon." The tall, slim woman with electric blue hair in the flight suit almost but not quite stifled a giggle. "You should have seen their faces not five minutes ago after your feet tore out the bottom of the bag when you sat up with half your face torn off. Shit got real interesting when your head fell off and started swearing!"

"Oh God, I'll never hear the end of it in the locker room. That is, if I didn't get myself canned for walking right into the line of fire when I should have waited for backup. But what else could I do? Ms. Goode walked right in front of the guy yammerin' at me somethin' about it bein' all my fault – I couldn't just stand there and let it happen!"

Raina re-adjusted the power cable that she'd slid into the hidden sockets beneath his ears and then the ones on the sides of her neck, "Mike, she's all right, traumatized but all right, and no, it wasn't your fault – don't go borrowing trouble if it's not yours. You did the right thing even if the Steins will probably have your hide for ruining all their hard work rebuilding you!"

"Worse," Mike groaned, "They'll give up and send me the bill for me and the rest of us. Where's Puck? Where's Maggie? Are they all right? That asshole didn't…"

"You don't remember?"

"All I remember is standin' up, gettin' shot, and then fallin' over."

"Maggie's all right. She was in the hall behind you – even though she was _supposed_ to be in her assigned classroom behind a locked door until the all clear bell rang – I'm letting her stay the night with her friend Draculaura who got a very bad fright."

"An' Puck?"

"Officer Sargent brought me her head. Her translator told me that she attacked Officer Sargent when Officer Sargent tried to investigate your body, so Officer Sargent accepted it as a challenge to a duel—" Fingers anchoring the loose flap of face so that it didn't tear further, Raina held Mike's head up so that he could see the pile of what was left of his niece laid out on a blanket roughly in the order which it belonged, "Now it's Humpty Dumpty time. Is she in the Meadow with you?"

"Yeah. Gone fishin'."

"Good." Raina sighed, adding, "I was hoping you'd say that." Resting Mike's head back on her lap, she reached into the First Aid kit that lay open beside her and pulled out a roll of surgical tape and a pair of scissors. "Hold still, I'm going to stabilize what's left of your face until I can airlift you and Puck to the Steins – Tepes has cleared my flight plan and will keep the press away from us for as long as he can – seems you're a bit of a hero in these here parts, pardner – you didn't just take down one shooter, but two."

"Great." Mike's head grumbled. "That's just what we need, _attention –_ what, _two?_?"

"Oh, shut up, _misiaczek_ , my little teddy bear – we'll talk about it later!" Raina firmly slapped a length of surgical tape over his mouth, "I'm just glad either asshole didn't mess you up to the point where we couldn't retrieve you!"

 **Ruby and Marlys - Twizzlers**

Ruby and Marlys crawled out from under their desks as the all clear bell rang at their elementary school a block over from Merston – lockdown was over.

Must have been some sort of drill.

Only for some reason, the teacher told them that they were all to go home early today once everybody picked up all the crayons and put them away.

"Cool!" Marlys said, sneaking a stale Twizzler from her dress pocket before passing it to Ruby as the two little girls picked up and put away all the spilled crayons, "I get to stay with you extra-long today until momma gets off work. Bet your dad'll pick us up in his big ol' truck!"

Ruby was too busy rolling the chemical red candy around in her mandibles as she gnawed on her fair share to say anything beyond a non-committal, happy rattle, anticipating Klondike bars.

 **A Dog's Life**

Panting, Jeremy F. rolled over onto his back in a jingle of dog tags on the Stein's back porch in a patch of afternoon sunlight. Thoroughly enjoying his new rudimentary digestive track, he farted.

Silent but deadly.

The man-gone-dog paddled his legs, half-asleep and chasing yellow dream rabbits as usual.

Only to give a sudden snuffling snort, quickly standing up on all fours, tongue lolling.

Flopping back on his haunches, Jeremy F. then began a long, thoughtful scratch behind one ear with one large back foot.

Duuuuuude, dog or not, like, maybe it was, like, time he got a job?

Thoroughly exhausted, Jeremy F. flopped over on his side, sound asleep once more.

Nahhhhhh. Tomorrow, dude. Tomorrow.

 **Jeff, sometime around sundown.**

Jeff woke up face down in a pile of leaves in a light rain, smelling terrible, head the clearest it had been in a long time.

He took a whiff of his soiled white hoodie, blood.

Fresh blood.

Nice.

He had awakened from a very nice dream about a girl.

A tall blonde.

With cat ears.

And a lot of blood.

Jeff loved dreams like that.

Thoroughly enjoying himself, he decided to go back to Sanctuary and eat Fruit Loops.

And maybe take a shower.


	15. Twitch

_Salem, Oregon, 2 a.m. the next morning_

 **I spy with my little eye…**

Having deflected most of the press and other vultures away from Merston High in the wake of the recent shooting, Vlad Tepes leaned back in his leather office chair that was almost a throne, fingers steepled under his chin, expensive silk shirt loosened at the collar, coldly watching what was going on after hours at Merston High on one of the monitors built into his office wall.

There were good reasons why he had such devices installed in the new High School. After all, he'd paid for the school to be built.

It was his school.

Ergo, he had the right to see what was going on in it.

Vlad Tepes was a man who enjoyed exercising his rights.

Like it or not.

 **Urban Myths**

Head suddenly and violently jerking to the left, Ticci Toby steadied himself, struck a match, and gave a sidelong glance at his partners in crime. Wordlessly, Hoodie and Masky nodded, having finished gathering up all the evidence of Jeffy's acting out had left behind during yesterday's shooting.

Giggling as he recited without too much stammering, "Merston High, Where Bright Futures Begin", the grinning Toby dropped the match into the school trash can beside the crime scene tape fluttering front door which they'd filled with evidence. The lighter fluid everything had been doused with caught immediately with a "whoosh", causing him to leap back, head twitching once more to the left, blue flames reflecting in his yellow goggles.

"So, what about Jeffy?" Masky's pale, expressionless mask rose from behind the flames with black, empty sockets. Hoodie's black head with the face scrawled across it in red enamel paint angled towards Ticci questioningly.

"Slendie told me what to do with Jeff once we find him." Twitching once more, Toby pulled his respirator mask over his mouth like he would for a fight with trembling hands, savoring the filtered smoky air even as he absently gnawed at his raw, scabby lower lip, enjoying the quiet relief the taste of his own blood brought. "From now on, we're on full lock—"

"Slick, man. Real slick, tripping over the lines on that downtown crosswalk, _Twitch-boy."_ Masky jeeredn from behind his own mask.

"But only after accidentally hacking one of the town drunks to pieces! Ha, classic Tobers!" cackled Hoodie. "It took us an _hour_ to sanitize THAT mess!"

Toby glared at them from behind yellow mirrors, glad that the respirator covered his reddening cheeks – trying not to let his tongue betray him, only his head did.

Again. Twitch. To the left, violent and abrupt.

"Why'd Slendy choose a loser like you for cleanup duty?" Masky jeered. "I've been wondering that all night."

Good question.

Twitch.

Back in Slenderman's abandoned Scout camp turned asylum, Ticci Toby was just some skinny nobody who liked waffles, swore for no good reason when his head wasn't trying to leave his body, and couldn't stop picking at his cuticles until they bled so he had to wear heavy work gloves. So, why WAS he put in charge of two meatheads who were better suited for a cleanup mission than him? Still, goddammit, (Twitch.) it was nice to get out every once in a fucking while – _Waffle House_ was open all night, right? Thinking about a stack of golden heart attacks with abs smothered in liquid diabetes with a side order of squeal, Toby snarked, "'Cause I'm a lot skinnier and smaller than you two assholes; stealthier too."

That, and a cup, make that six cups, of coffee.

And maybe scrambled eggs with cheese – shit-shit-shit! Ticci Toby swallowed hard, doing his best to rein in his Tourette's before it broke his temporary dominance over the other two.

"How's about we…" started Masky. Hoodie, picking up Masky's rickety choo-choo train of thought, interrupted with, "Yeah, how's about we summon _Him_ , maybe ask _Him_ why _He_ would choose such a _twerp_ to lead _us_ tonight?"

For good measure, Hoodie leaned into Ticci's face and gave a perfect imitation of Ticci's involuntary spastic head twitch to the left as Masky burped out a braying laugh.

In a blur of motion, Toby smashed their heads together, "How's about we _don't?_ Slenderman hates it when needle noggins like you summon him for no fucking goddam reason." Toby dropped the now dizzy Masky and Hoody heavily to the sidewalk beside the burning school trash can, pulling out his hatchet. Thoughtfully he spun the weapon one handedly, looking down at them, "Now, you two wanna cause big panic in Little Oregon or not? You remember what happened last time Jeff got loose?"

"No, sir. Yes sir." They said in unison, temporarily subdued.

Blood slowly trickled from the nostrils of Masky's mask.

Good.

"Now let's go round up Jeff before he gets really whimsical."

Twitch.

 **The eye closes.**

Tepes absently reached for the remote on his desk, and casually turned the monitor that displayed the goings on at Merston High's violated front door, off.

There were other RADS who fell under his, for lack of a better word, _jurisdiction._

RADS who gave the more _socially acceptable_ ones a bad name.

RADS who heedlessly pulled the entire house of cards down upon not only themselves, but everyone around them, without so much as a backward glance.

Humans didn't care to differentiate when a body showed up hacked to pieces. The first RAD to have the bad luck to be seen, guilty or not, was usually the one lynched.

Once Tepes would have had the entire lot of them, humans and ShadowRADS impaled and left to die along Transylvania's major highways and byways, as examples, but times had changed.

Sometimes, you needed the unruly.

The dangerous.

The easily disavowed.

Speaking of dangerous and easily disavowed, Jeff the Serial Killer had somehow slipped his leash.

This would not do.

Tepes would have to have a little talk with Jeff's keeper, Slenderman, a nightmare demon who fed off of the nightmares of nightmares.

But for the moment, Tepes needed to go through his current stock portfolio and make a few decisions.

Draculaura's father picked up a fine hand-crafted pen, gold, and began taking notes.


	16. Happy in Her Outrage

_Saturday, September 201-, Salem, Oregon, one week later_

 **How to be offended without even trying.**

Ms. Goode had entered the gated neighborhood ready to be offended.

Happily, she found plenty to be offended by.

For one thing, the houses were huge, well back from the street, and were that intricate form of casual ornate that not only said "Money lives here." But, "Money not only lives here, but it's been here for a while, and it really doesn't give a shit what you think. Because no matter how outraged you get, your opinion doesn't matter because it will be here long after you are gone."

For another, the unconscious aloofness the entire neighborhood gave off reminded Ms. Goode of back in her high school days of the popular girls who occupied a social position so high above her that she didn't even exist. They weren't exactly mean, it's just that Ms. Goode, who grew up in a tiny two-bedroom house that her assembly line worker father had built himself post-Viet Nam with the G.I. Bill, simply didn't mean anything to them as they glided past like so many giggling swans in their perfect hair, clothes, makeup – and vision.

In other words, for all her earnestness, for all her soul, for all her _concern_ , Ms. Goode was invisible.

But the address she'd found on file for Marion (Puck) Schmidt unmistakably said that this was where she lived, and Ms. Goode needed to deliver a week's worth of homework. So Ms. Goode had put on her Birkenstocks, her free trade recycled fiber winter hat, and Gerald's beloved handwoven alpaca poncho that he'd swapped two pairs of old worn out hiking boots for in Peru while on their honeymoon back in the 1980s, ready to do her part.

After coasting up and down the well-maintained maze of streets in the aforementioned gated neighborhood for over an hour, she'd finally found their address.

Parking her smart car on the curb, Helen Goode stared at the ecologically unsound iceberg of an Art Deco monstrosity for at least ten minutes, trying to figure out how their uncle could afford to live in such a blatant explosion of conspicuous consumerism much less pay the electric bill on a cop's salary.

Obviously he was accepting bribes.

It wasn't that she wasn't grateful to him for what he'd done, but she was more than a little peeved at Officer Schmidt hiding his RAD status from her of all people.

She was, after all, here to help all RADS live up to their potential without sacrificing themselves to the dominant culture they were forced to conform to.

Finally, Ms. Goode got out of the smart car, picked up her vegan leather tote full of Puck's homework, and started the long trek across the vast expanse of velvety green ecologically unsound lawn towards the ecological rape that was Mike Schmidt's house.

She made it about twenty-five feet when she noticed the noise.

Was that… thunder?

Ms. Goode looked up at the sky, which was a late autumnal blue that was so blue as to be almost black.

Yes, that was thunder, and… lightning?

The windows decorating the blank white façade with its minimalist accents of black and glass brick flickered.

Ms. Goode straightened Gerald's beloved poncho, adjusted the load of homework, and started her steady march forward, determined to fulfil her mission.

Ten feet from the door, she stopped, The thunder was louder, the windows were flickering, and the wind charger that loomed over the house (much to her surprised approval) hummed loudly as it spun.

What in Gaia's name was going on here?

She shook her head, feeling static electricity build up in everything around her so that when she reached for the art deco doorbell, she got herself a nasty little zap.

Sucking her fingers, Ms. Goode leapt back when a figure masked in white with mis-matched blue and green eyes suddenly opened the door, pulled down the mask (which had been embellished with rhinestones, exclaiming, "Sorry about the mad scientist schtick – dad got a VOLTAGE deal on ebay last week and couldn't wait to try it out. He is SUCH a traditionalist –DAD! Turn off the van de Graaff generators and the Tesla coils – we have COMPANY!" Frankie Stein hollered, adding, "It's Ms. Goode, the Diversity Advisor from school. Should I let her in?"

 **"Who pissed in her Froot Loops?"**

Frankie Stein didn't want to be rude, but the last person she wanted to see standing on mom and dad's doorstep was Ms. Goode.

No offense, but Ms. Goode, Twatwaffle, was _lame._

It started the first full day of school after the shooting incident with Twatwaffle taking Frankie aside and telling her in front of EVERYBODY that she didn't need to wear makeup and streak her hair in order to fit in with the unrealistic beauty expectations of the dominant culture surrounding her.

Huh?

"Huh?" As in, "But mom and dad had this foundation custom blended for me for my birthday – it's the perfect shade of minty green!"

"Huh?" As in, "But my hair has always had streaks in it! If I wasn't supposed to have streaks in my hair, mom and dad wouldn't have included them in my blueprints – they set off my chrome neck bolts perfectly!"

Twatwaffle THEN told a blushing Melody the Siren, who wasn't shedding much in the way of feathers lately, that to force her culture upon the other girls was W.R.O.N.G and to check her human privilege.

"But I AM a RA—"

Too late, the heedless Twatwaffle moved onto Clawdeen, telling the werewolf girl that she didn't have to style her hair at all – she should go natural and remain true to her ethnic roots instead, blah-blah-blah… and she really needed to GO VEGAN. It was SO MUCH BETTER FOR HER as well AS THE PLANET!

It took Melody, Frankie, PLUS Draculaura and Maggie (who miraculously didn't attract Twatwaffle's attention) to hold the snarling Clawdeen, who'd just had her hair dyed a _tres chique ombre_ in purple to match her latest gel manicure, back.

Clawdeen grinned with delighted anticipation as Twatwaffle THEN gently but kindly told Cleo de Nile that she should insist that all her lessons be in Egyptian because it was cruel that she be forced to learn English.

5.

4.

3.

2.

1\. (Oooooohhhh, dis gonna be good!)

Cleo, reared back, exposing centuries of royal breeding in one cobra-like move. Smiling like a cat that had just eaten an entire pet shop's worth of canaries, Cleo then stared down her regal but cute nose at Twatwaffle disdainfully spitting out, "Va te faire enculer, _salope!"_ (French for: "Go fuck yourself, _bitch!")_

"That's the spirit!" The beaming Twatwaffle, moral duty fulfilled, scurried towards the Sargent twins (who were happily flexing themselves in front of an admiring audience of cheerleaders) to inform them that deodorant was not needed in order to be socially acceptable, no matter WHAT Officer Schmidt, an obvious Uncle Tom though a RAD and a local hero, told them. NOT!

"Buh'bye Felicia. Non hai capito una sega, _puttana!"_ (Italian for: "You don't understand shit _bitch!_ ") Cleo cooed sweetly after Twatwaffle while adjusting her bandage skirt, followed by: "Bakka!" (Japanese for "Idiot!"), a smirk, and an eyeroll.

Twatwaffle, who obviously had NO IDEA that she'd just been read for filth by the best, turned and beamed at them all, before returning to her self-appointed mission of making life better for all RADS everywhere.

Cleo straightened, watched Twatwaffle's scurry, and then said loudly, "She's got TP on her shoe!" before allowing Deuce, her boyfriend, to escort her to honors French.

Leave it to the Queen of Mean to sum it up for all of them.

And now Twatwaffle, no, Ms. Goode was here.

On Frankie's doorstep.

Complete with frumpy hemp "We are all special." t-shirt, dowdy denim skirt, Birkenstocks with socks, and her usual painfully earnest attitude of well-meaning concern.

And, OMG, was that a _poncho?_ It looked like the woman had survived a vicious moth attack!

Ew.

Still, Frankie was a polite girl, her parents had made her this way. "Are you here for Marion? I mean, Puck?"

Only she realized that Twatwaffle was staring past Frankie, face purple with outrage.

Frankie followed her gaze. Oh. Dexter Igor.

What about him?

Ok, so Dexie was a hot mess of an ass even on a good day and had to sit at the table outside during lunch because he liked to belch the alphabet after eating pickled herring and garlic bagels, but?

"H-how…" Twatwaffle pointed at Dexie, finger trembling, "How DARE you!"

"Wha?" Dexie looked puzzled. He poked at his hunched back, turning around and around staring at it over his shoulder like a dog chasing his tail, "You don't like it?"

"How DARE you taunt the differently abled!"

"What the what? Differently… abled?" Dexie, who wanted to be a neurosurgeon, stopped his slo-mo spin, pulled the fake hump out from under his surgical gown, and held it out to Ms. Goode, a puzzled look on his narrow, pimply face, "It's a family heirloom – granddad Igor left it to me in his will. Mr. Stein is really, REALLY into tradition. I had to wear it today because we're installing Officer Schmidt's new central nervous system – it's hot, kinda itchy, and made mom sneeze all the way to the dry cleaners. The hump, dude, not the nervous system." Dexie then sneezed in a cloud of little bits of sawdust and feathers, wiped his nose on his sleeve and then asked Frankie, "Who pissed in her Froot Loops?"

 **Oh.**

Blinking, Helen Goode paused mid-outrage. Tall, gangly Dexter Igor with his limp, greasy hair and ears that could double as sails in a high wind was wearing a PROSTHETIC hump because it was _traditional?_

 _Traditional_ as in, "A beautiful part of his beautiful native culture?"

How in Gaia's name could something as cruel making fun of the, the _disabled_ (though Helen hated the word, it was mean) be part of a gentle non-dominant culture's folkways?

It went against everything Helen believed in. Born white, she had no right to judge the ways of others… but… but… but… STILL!

Dazed, Helen allowed herself to be ushered into the Schmidt home by a girl whose parents had literally made her and a boy from a family that made an excellent living through chiropractics.

 **Puck, Herself**

It was, Puck reflected with her head on a shelf, newly reworked body nearby on a marble slab, actually kind of cool having a great big giant cockroach for a best friend.

Even if she sometimes ate Puck's homework. Tina loved stale Twizzlers, but red ink was da bomb – Puck's math papers were really REALLY TASTY!

Nibbling on her old shell, Tina bashfully revealed to the cat girl the morning after Cleo de Nile's back to school house party that her parents had been found wandering around in a daze next to a melting alpine glacier by a Swiss artist named Giger long before she'd been hatched.

He let them live in his basement for decades rent-free in return for eating his garbage, keeping the place picked up, and modeling.

Puck gaped at Tina at this bit of choice news.

Giggling, Tina crunched down on one of her old shell's hollow legs like a candy stick after telling Puck that yes, her parents once modeled for the famous Swiss artist whose art had been used in Hollywood movies.

The girls had sat under the rhododendrons, each thinking their own thoughts before Tina continued: turns out she and her family were just a formerly thought to be extinct species of insect from around the time cockroaches and termites broke off to form their own family trees – _Blattodeaus_ , in fact.

Tina was really proud of this family connection as well as being able thrive for a long time on a diet of old paste, homework, and pencil shavings when push came to shove. (And that most radiation wasn't a problem. NOT that she was one to brag – but if Cleo de Nile thought her family tree was something special, Cleo didn't have nothin' on Tina's!)

Anyway, after Mr. Giger died, thinking that if Hollywood liked his art, they'd LOVE her mom and dad, who were the real thing. But all they could get after sneaking into the U.S. from Europe in a cargo container were a few cameos on Raid commercials.

So, broke and wanting to start a family, they'd come to Salem two years ago after Frankie outed the RADS, thinking that if Salem could tolerate a vampire, a mummy, a werewolf, and similar, how about two really big _Blattadeus_ who didn't mind eating leftovers out of back alley dumpsters?

"We're good for the environment," her dad had chittered, "They'll love us in Salem!"

So they'd moved up from L.A., and had been there ever since, lapping up the goodies while moving up the social ladder – he was now a school janitor!

Puck's only contribution to this conversation was to mention casually after she'd picked herself and her things up off of the ground having slipped in Tina's drool (Not drool, tears. Who knew?) that she'd not seen Tina at the party. Tina reluctantly admitted that she'd fled Cleo's party after Cleo asked her opinion on how great Cleo's house was.

"I didn't know she didn't want the truth. So, I told her it was so, so…. EIGHTIES! I mean, it was like being trapped in an old disco ball splattered with cheap gold paint!"

"Nuh-uh, you _didn't!"_ Puck, who had been in Cleo de Nile's living room for less than two seconds before the aggressively Egyptian theme had chased her out, exclaimed in disbelief. _"Tell me you didn't!_

"Girlfriend, _I did!"_ Tina nibbled on another leg from her old shell – waste not, want not. She'd shed last night and was a lovely, glistening black with faint rainbows if you looked right. "Then she called me ratchet - now nobody will want to hang with me!"

"Cleo think she's all that and a bag of chips." Having been called "gritty" by Cleo, Puck sniggered, "She ain't. She picks her nose when she thinks nobody's looking!"

"Whaaaaaaaaat?" Tina began to titter. "No way!"

"Wa-a-a-A-a-a-ay!" Puck finished wiping Tina's drool, no, _tears_ , from the cover of her sketchbook with a handful of dead leaves while Jeremy did the back dance nearby, like a real dog. There were advantages to being "invisible".

She'd been hiding in one of the girl's bathrooms to avoid having to sit plugged into a wall outlet while being stared at for reading by herself in the lunchroom while Maggie and her bitchy new friends gossiped over vegan chili and extension cords when Cleo came in to touch up her contouring before pulling a huge green booger out of her perfect nose (It HAD to be fake, nobody's nose was that cute!) – looked at it…and then… and then…. ATE IT!

Gleefully exclaiming over this deliciously shocking information, Puck and Tina found themselves all but wetting their pants, had either one of them been physically capable, laughing at the high and mighty Bitch Queen of deNial's nasty habits.

Tina agreeing on ANYTHING being nasty was saying something.

"Hey!" Great. Frankie Stein, their landlord's daughter and one of Maggie's bitch pack. Why couldn't it be Tina poking her long sleek head with its bony frill through the window bearing stale Twizzlers, Diet Coke, and the latest dirt on the popular kids?

"Whassup?" Puck's head frowned. Looking out the window was beyond boring. Maybe if she asked nice, Frankie would switch on the nearby computer and turn Puck around so she could watch old _Betty Boop_ and li'l darlin' _Bendy_ cartoons on YouTube until it was her turn to be worked on.

"Ms. Good is here!" Frankie grimaced, "She wants to help you keep up with your homework!"

Gaaaaaaagggggg meeeeeeee.

Instead of Tina coming to dish something good or watching her favorite random old cartoons, Puck found herself facing the lame Diversity Advisor "helping" her keep up her studies while her body was being rebuilt.

"Twatwaffle? That's just icing on the dropped cupcake with eyeballs." Puck grumbled, "Why can't I watch _a Silly Symphony?_ Somebody punt me out the window!"


	17. Clumsy Circles

_(Still!) Saturday, September 201-, Salem, Oregon, one week later_

 **SBD**

Helen Goode woke with a start to the smell of SBD.

Bad SBD

Having spent most of her life around devout vegetarians, this was saying something.

Somebody had obviously forgotten to sprinkle asafetida on their fava beans.

She looked down.

A hairy grinning face, chin resting on her knee looked up at her. "Yo. Like, s'up, dude?"

Helen fainted again.

A talking dog was simply the last straw.

A talking dog that sounded like "Shaggy" from _Scooby Doo_ , moreso.

A talking dog that reminded her that obviously her chakras were NOT aligned? Not even a gallon of imported organic lavender blessed by the Dalai Llama himself would help in this situation!

A few minutes later, Helen Goode swam back to the surface of her mind and cautiously opened one eye.

The dog was still there, only it wasn't a dog, but a pile of spare parts somebody had patched together to resemble a dog, before tossing a ratty bath-mat over the entire works and calling it a day.

"Yo."

"H-hello?"

"You, like, okay?"

"Y-yes."

"Cool. I'm Jeremy. Jeremy Fitzgerald. The family dog. Shake?"

Helen took the proffered paw, that was more like a hand than a paw. "Nice…Jeremy?"

"Call me Fitzie. Nobody expects anything of dog, so…" The dog, no Fitzie, waggled his eyebrows. "Somebody had to be the dog. So, here I am."

A talking dog, with eyebrows. Helen released the paw, swaying.

"You okay?" His long, ragged tail swished along the floor, wagging.

"I just said I was." Helen caught herself, "Yes, I'm fine. I'm fine. What happened?"

"Yo, lady, you, like were helpin' Puck with the school jazz until you went lookin' for the toidy and like, opened the wrong door."

Frankie Stein had brought her into a little room with a marble slab with a body on it. Beside the body watching YouTube videos, had been Puck's severed head.

With wires connected to a wall outlet.

Puck's head had been really, really rude. But Helen Goode persevered, once she got over the initial shock.

Until Nature called.

She'd wandered up and down the white maze-like halls of the Schmidt house, until desperate, chose a door at random.

Only instead of a doubtlessly ecologically unsound toilet, she'd walked in on something out of an old horror movie.

A heavily sweating Officer Schmidt lay face down on a marble slab with the skin of his heavily tattooed back peeled back, revealing a pale network of exposed muscle and bone. His tattooed legs had been neatly removed and lay on a nearby steel cart like legs of lamb in a butcher shop bristling with surgical clamps. Frankie Stein, and Dexter Igor stood nearby watching as the mad scientist, a man with green skin like Frankie's and wearing an old-fashioned surgical gown poked at what looked like Officer Schmidt's open spinal column with a steel rod.

Officer Schmidt, convulsed, swallowing a scream, gripping the hands of the tall, willowy woman in a surgical gown who stood at the head of the slab.

"I'm sorry Michael, but you need to be awake for this portion of the upgrade, so I know the new nerves are properly calibrated before Dexter seals the augmentation. Frankie, Dexter, if you'll notice that when I—" Victor Stein withdrew the probe and stared at Helen, more annoyed at being interrupted than mad, saying, "Yes? May I help you?"

"I-I-I… Where's the bathroom?" Helen whimpered in a very, very small voice. Officer Schmidt turned his head and stared at her blankly, face dripping with sweat.

"Third door on the left." He gasped as the black and white tiled floor rose to kiss Helen Goode firmly on the mouth.

You would think after that a talking dog would barely register.

 **A Dog's Life**

Jeremy, who'd been dozing under Mike's marble slab after having been run through the Stein family's autoclave, had won the job of keeping an eye on the uninvited guest.

Not that he minded. It was another opportunity to catch up on his napping.

Anyway, he liked how she smelled: patchouli and pencil shavings.

That, and well, any chance at catching up on a nap was not to be sneezed at.

He'd heard Mike mention Ms. Goode after work.

She wasn't as bad as Jeremy had expected. For one thing, he'd yet to see the corn cob up her ass. Or her breathe fire.

 _Corn cob aside, as to flaming breath,_ Jeremy reflected, _this IS Salem, Oregon. Like, give her time!_

Fitzie's ears perked up. _Heeeeyyyyyyy, does she, like, maybe know of any job openings? Something easy, where I get paid to like, do nothing?_

 **Knock first!**

"So, where am I?" Helen asked Fitzie, who was now scratching vigorously at his horrible pelt in a cloud of loose fuzz and a jingle of dog tags.

No, wait, those weren't a dog tags, but a set of house keys and an iPod.

"You're on the Stein's family basking porch. They put you back here after you fainted." Fitzie gave her a reproachful look, "You, like, REALLY need to learn to knock first. What if you'd walked in on somebody doin' their biz after eating a box of expired Hot Pockets? Not cool!"

Remembering what she'd actually walked in on, Helen gave a slightly hysterical little laugh. "The Steins? Basking porch?"

"Yeah, we like, rent the guest house and sunbathe in the yard on old blankets when it's not raining to save money– but, like, that's what you get on a cop's salary. Me? I get to sleep under the porch …know of any job openings?" Fitzie rose, shaking himself all over, adding to the ambient fuzz-cloud, and scratched at the door that led into the yard, "Like, mind getting' that for me? It's tough opening doors when you don't have thumbs."

 **Dogs don't laugh.**

Helen Goode followed the bizarre dog through the crisp twilight across the frosty autumnal lawn towards the lit guest house, music coming faintly to her in the wind from the Cascades.

It was some old Peter Gabriel tune, Your Eyes. Maybe, maybe not. At the time the song had come out she'd been more interested in Bob Marley tunes because the Top 40 was so shallow as to be unbelievable.

(So what if Marley sometimes sounded like he was laughing? He sang for the people, he hadn't sold out, and that had been enough for Helen Goode.)

"…all my instincts, they return and the grand facade, so soon will burn…"

Fitzie stopped and looked over his shoulder at Ms. Goode; he appeared to be laughing in the moonlight.

Ridiculous. Dogs don't laugh. Che didn't.

But then again, Gerald's beloved dog never seemed as happy, as content, as Fitzie.

Disturbed by this realization, Helen stepped past the strange, ragged dog-man man-dog and standing at the edge of the squares of light cast upon the lawn looked in the window at the people inside the small, brightly lit bare living room as they danced.

Officer Schmidt, intact as if she hadn't seen him with… everything… exposed, was barefoot in an old faded Marine Corps t-shirt with the sleeves missing and cutoff shorts, tattoos swirling around his arms and legs, guiding Puck, who now waved a velvety brown tail behind her, brown velvet ears pricked alertly through her shaggy blonde hair, through an impromptu dance, both of them unsteady on their feet as the tall, graceful tattooed woman Helen had seen earlier laughingly shook out her bright indigo mane while steadying them both across the bare hardwood floor with inhuman grace as Fitzi barked, running clumsy doggy circles around them, claws loud against the bare wood even through the muffling window glass.

"…in your eyes, I am complete, in your eyes…"

Helen stood, tears streaming down her face in the dark, remembering what life had been like before Gerald had eaten that stupid mushroom, when Bliss had been innocent, and Ubuntu was happy to play with his Waldorf figures and drink kale smoothies.

"…oh, I want to be that complete, I want to touch the light, the heat I see in your eyes…"

Schmidt easily lifted Puck, turning her over his head, setting her down so that for a split second their faces, side by side looked like reflections, like father and daughter, the spell breaking when the blue-haired woman took Puck's place and a sullen Maggie slipped out the door towards the money hidden beneath a brick near the stoop.

"…in your eyes in your eyes…"

Only Helen didn't see Maggie, being already in the driver's seat of her smart car, driving home to an evening of NPR news and cold leftover tofu and seaweed casserole in her empty but ecologically sound house on the other side of Salem.

 **Somewhere in the Cascades**

The man with dark hair sat upon the veranda of the rustic lodge he'd rented in the Cascades, contemplating the rising full moon in the perfectly still frost-laden mountain air.

Salem was... interesting.

Retrieving his master's property... could wait.

He finished his _Botchan Dango_ , washing them down with fine tea, green, from a porcelain cup, 3,000 years old.

Anything newer, would have been gauche.


	18. Strange Gifts

_Salem, Oregon, the Stein's back yard, September, 201-, two weeks later._

 **Weird Shit**

Still on medical administrative leave and stripped to his BVDs, Mike looked up from where he lay basking on a blanket on the remains of last summer's lawn behind the Stein's guest house on one of the few non-rainy days he'd so far experienced in Salem.

Dozy, he squinted. There was something that wasn't a squirrel moving around at the bottom of the property by the huge, now bare tangle of rhododendron bushes.

The bushes shifted and then stilled.

Two sets of footprints, well over size twelve by his guestimate, slowly, cautiously approached him.

Mike, having experienced a "whole lotta weird shit, y'all" in the last decade or more sat up, more intrigued than alarmed. He watched as the close-cropped grass sank and then rose here, and then there, as whoever it was skulked from bush to birdbath to koi pond followed by what Mrs. Stein was always telling him was a tree peony start and would he PLEASE stop mowing it down?

Finally, the Sargent brothers shimmered into view, closer to Mike than anticipated, carrying something between them.

Something wrapped in what looked like an old paisley tablecloth, vintage 1970s, judging by the screaming oranges, pinks, and dirty greens.

As one, they knelt, and together, as if they'd practiced the move, slid it towards him, sitting back on their heels, expectantly.

Not wanting to be rude, Mike cautiously undid the intricate knots holding the tablecloth turned bag (It really was a tablecloth, complete with stains and screaming orange dingle ball trim.) shut.

In a cloud of Axe, the Sargent brothers, blank faces of their breathing masks glinting in the gold of a late Autumn sun, leaned forward.

Mike slowly, cautiously, pulled out what it held turning it around in his hands.

What exactly the hell was it?

 **Proud Parents**

Patador Sargent, the closest thing the entire Yautja species had ever produced in its long, aggressive history that came close to Leonardo Davinci, stood Cloaked at a safe distance, Mrs. Sargent nearby, equally invisible.

It was time for the boys to acquire a mentor and move out of their mother's bower to become men.

Mainly this was because they were driving everyone crazy.

That, and the _smell._

Greasy, overpowering hormonal stench aside, it was getting expensive to feed them all on two government paychecks. The local slaughterhouse charged for offal by the pound - the poundage had gone up since the boys hit puberty.

Back in the clan flotilla as it wended its way through the stars, Fred and Ted would have been ceremoniously but firmly ejected from their mother's bower a long time ago, deliberately cut adrift to find a mentor who would finish their education.

Attachment parenting only got you so far with the Yautja, who tended to cut any and all apron strings with a battle axe and a loud war cry followed by warning shots if the target didn't get the hint fast enough.

And fire, if necessary.

This NOT being the flotilla, considerably reduced Fredator and Tedator's options.

Pat had no illusions. Having miraculously avoided culling in infancy, he was still inferior, a Danny DaVito stumping around on short legs among a species that consisted of Arnold Schwarzenegger and The Rock (including the women), making him a target for disdain, random physical abuse, and mandatory castration for his many physical defects for fear he'd breed. He also had no real hope for his male offspring's chances should the flotilla rescue them from this bizarre but opportunity laden backwater planet – they would have to find a mentor where they could.

He leaned closer, squinting near-sightedly through his thick trifocals… SUCCESS!

Fred and Ted's proud parents gave discreet, triumphal hoots, slugging each other on the shoulder: the closest thing to an acceptable mentor they'd encountered in the area so far, had opened their offspring's gift with it's rare and beautiful wrapping.

Not to get overly personal, but why would a warrior of Officer Schmidt's prowess be so, so _bald?_

Hairline like DeVito's, Patador had put his clever talons to work, talons whose output many moons ago had earned him a superior mate. Making a wig out of the rope from bundles of animal fodder so that it matched the disgraceful stubble on the ooman's head had been one of his best, most inspired ideas yet.

They paused, holding their breaths in anticipation.

Yes! Yes! He'd accepted their Gift of Intention, individually carved bone beads, wiry blonde locks, and all!

All but dancing the "Triumph at the Expense of Our Closest Neighbors Involving Laser Cannons and Axes", the Sargents silently withdrew, Fredator and Tedator no longer their problem but Officer Schmidt's.

 **Surrender to the Crazy**

Raina too, had seen a lot of weird shit in the last couple of years, making it hard to faze her.

But whatever the hell it was that Mike was wearing on his head when she pulled up on her Harley-Davidson Shovelhead after working a last-minute emergency shift on her day off, it was… was… _What the hell was it?_

Pocketing her keys, Raina walked over to where Mike sat cross legged on an old blanket with the whatever it was perched on his head in the late autumn sun; a bemused expression on his face.

It looked like somebody had very carefully unraveled length after length of rope, and then somehow reformed the resulting mess into long dreads before decorating the results with beads so that he looked like Bob Marley had he been born, say, in Germany to blonde blue-eyed German parents who'd once visited Jamaica and liked the hairstyle.

Or that somebody who was bad at crafts had attempted to make a lion costume, only they'd never seen a lion (not even on the Internet) so they winged it using whatever they found lying around the house going on descriptions, none of them accurate.

But they got bored halfway through and Bedazzled it.

Only to run out of jewels so they used their little sister's pop beads instead without asking.

Before abandoning it on top of her husband's head.

"Mike? _Misaku?_ (Teddy bear?)" Raina stopped at the edge of the blanket he was sitting on in his BVDs thinking: _Time to throw those out when he isn't looking and replace them with a new pair once I figure out where he hides them._ Out loud she said, "What the fuck is _that_ on your head, _skarbie_ (honey)?"

"I… don't… know. Two of the kids from where I work just showed up out of nowhere and handed it to me. Then they sort of… left."

"I. See." Whatever it was, somebody had put an awful lot of effort into this mop with runway ambitions. "And you're wearing it. On your head."

Stepping over the garish table cloth, Raina attempted to stifle a laugh, only to have it shoot out of her nose.

"Yeah." Mike looked steadily up at her from under the ummmm, _mane_ , as if he didn't quite understand her reaction, "My head was cold. I THINK it's a hat."

"Oh." Raina said, looking down at her feet trying not to make a crack about Mike's unruly red bush of a lumberjack beard, which he'd let grow in since going on administrative medical leave simply because he could. It looked really weird topped by his habitual high and tight. She'd learned the hard way that if she brought certain things up, he'd stubbornly cling to them out of sheer Germanic oneryness. She didn't feel like having the beard become one of those certain things.

Thinking: _Try to remember that we're lucky that loser didn't hit anything vital when he shot Mike. But If that nasty thing pokes me in the eye one more time… I'm ripping it out by the roots! Oh well, be patient. He's been cleared for duty starting tomorrow morning; it'll be gone by then, thank GOD!_ Raina asked out loud, "I know Maggie's over at the Wolf's house down the street working on a group assignment with Clawdeen, but have you seen Puck? She wasn't here this morning when I left for work."

"Job. Thought I told you." Mike bemusedly studied one of the beads. It might have been bone and looked like a little skull, which was kind of cool. "Some restaurant downtown. Part time, I signed the papers for her." He dropped it and stared up at Raina, blonde bead-studded mop slowly sliding away from his forehead before giving up and falling off entirely, landing behind him like a dropped octopus at a Japanese fish market.

Mike picked it up, shook it out, and placed it back on his head.

"Aaaaaaand, you're wearing on your head what the current president would be wearing if he'd been born in Jamaica? On purpose? Only not as orange? _Riiiiiiiight."_ Raina drawled wryly. She'd been making a lot of overtime lately. While the extra money was great, her ability to long distance manage the antics of the blended family she'd been roped into now matched that of Mrs. Waterson, the eternally exasperated blue cat on _The Amazing World of Gumball._

 _None at all._

"It' a get-well gift… _I think."_ Mike drawled, tipping his head towards the rhododendron tangle at the back of the yard, "Didn't want t' hurt their feelings. And my head was cold."

"I see,"

Last week, when the Steins repaired Mike, in addition to his new central nervous system, they'd made a few, ummmmmmm, _technical refinements_ to parts of Mike that needed, well, _refining_ , and it wasn't just the addition of realistic toes and a naval.

This now meant Raina and the girls had to make sure Mike remembered to wear pants before he set foot out the door. Having spent a decade or more possessing a genderless rotund pink and white mechanical cartoon bear owned by a kiddie entertainment company, he'd gotten out of the habit of wearing them, bellowing "NO PANTS are the best pants!" over the shrieked objections of the rest of the household as he thudded around the house on his new, improved feet with ten actual toes, wearing only BVDs, "I'M the ROOSTER in THIS HERE HENHOUSE. I'm wearin' skivvies, so quitcha bitchin', ladies!"

Rooster or not, after a female UPS driver got herself a big ol' eyeful (the BVDs were in the wash, oh dear GOD!) when making a delivery that needed a signature, Raina now always made sure there was always a pair of XXXL Carharts hanging on a hook beside the front door in case Mike answered the doorbell before she or one of the girls could.

Realizing they had the place to themselves, Raina surrendered to the crazy by stripping down to her bra and panties and joined Mike, Mike's obnoxious beard, and Mike's appalling BVDs on the blanket for a bit of a bask, the, ummmm, _wig_ engulfing his head like a randy mop.

Some things just aren't worth fighting over.

 **Fred and Ted**

The twins danced their own raucous dance of triumph to the old traditional chant of, "We just burned your house down. What'cha gonna do about it?" in the dead leaves beneath the rhododendrons, sounding like a pair of demented OCD woodpeckers working over a hollow log - he accepted their offering and by extension, _them!_

Obviously, Mike's mate liked the new and improved Mike because she just now lay down beside him to do whatever it was that oomans did when oomans did whatever it was that oomans did.

When they did it.

Whatever it was.

With sudden adolescent bashfulness, the two brothers slipped off to somewhere to give their new mentor his privacy.

 **Puck and Maggie**

"Ewwwwwwww! What's that THING on Uncle Mike'sHEAD?" Maggie giggled while peeking around the side of the guest house, "Like, the _beard_ is bad enough - gimme my cell phone!"

"I dunno. Whatever it is, it's hungry!" Snarked Puck, who was home early from work. Pausing _Angry Birds,_ she slapped the Bedazzled iPhone across Maggie's dainty palm– "Here you go, _biach_. Looks like Fred and Ted made that hot mess in art class. Bet Ms. Lane gave 'em an F!"

"I am NOT a _biach, biach_ \- your Facebook or mine?" was Maggie's murmured response. Frowning in concentration, she raised the iPhone to a flattering angle with her uncle and his new _friend_ in the background. She tipped her head to one side, going full-on duck lips.

"Nahhhhhh," Puck replied, thoughtfully picking a bit of loose stucco on the side of the Stein's guesthouse, "Instagram." Something had been bothering her lately about Maggie – ever since she'd caught her sister "borrowing" her beloved bomber.

Then it finally registered _,_ "HEY!" Puck hollered, "How come _you_ get an iPhone 7 and Mall clothes while all I get are two pairs of Wal-Mart sweat pants, a t-shirt, and P.E. shorts, and not even a lousy Pay as You Go flip phone? _Uncle Mike? Aunt Raina? No fair!"_


	19. DIY

_Salem, Oregon, the Stein's back yard, September, 201-, the same day._

 **Common Sense**

Invisible, Fred and Ted crouched in traditional positions of honor on either side of the Schmidt's rented front door, happily discussing the argument that raged inside their new mentor's mate's bower.

Whatever it was about, it was obviously dangerous because it involved matrons and maidens – had the two youths been invited, they would have happily joined the fray. To the average Yautja, family quarrels are as good as a Hunt, if not BETTER because rattling your mandibles in a blood relative's faces while grappling with them is exhilarating, particularly if furniture gets thrown, dreads get ripped out, and windows smashed.

Preferably by heaving the limp bodies of your enemies through them.

But, their mother had raised them well. They would politely keep to the sidelines until invited.

Suddenly the noise subsided: their new mentor's mate, who inexplicably wore her hair loose, hollered something about the small maiden having too many clothes and the tall maiden having not enough clothes, and that she would take the tall maiden shopping while their new mentor took the small maiden back to the market to return her too-too many piles-of-clothes as the small maiden wailed that she needed all those clothes to look cute and attract boys* and that was the end of it or there would be biiiig trouble for everybody, "Because-I-have-had-enough-of-this-shit! Do you understand?"

Looooong silence, followed by a subdued, "Yes, m'am."

 _"GOOD! We'll sort the rest out later!"_

The two Yautja teenagers whooped, head butting each other for being so lucky in their choice of a mentor. Why? Because he had wisely stepped back to let the wiser half of his marriage take over and do the decision making!

Minutes later, a still invisible Fred and Ted proudly loped along either side of the borrowed SUV, providing their new mentor and his clan with the proper honor guard for such a dangerous undertaking: settling a dispute among matrons and maidens with a (disappointing) minimum of property damage.

(*This was weird. According to Yautja beauty standards, all a NICE maiden needed to be considered attractive was an armored bra, a flame-retardant breechclout, a currrrrrrrrrve hugging wire suit, personal hunting electronics, a choice array of high and low-tech weaponry, and the ability to use them. Fertility and intelligence? Hubba hubba! The ability to effortlessly rip a suitor's head off without breaking stride was a bonus: hot, but unnecessary were she good with a knife. Oh, and the wisdom not to allow the first Yautja buck that come along into her bower – Yautja maidens worth parading severed heads in front of had STANDARDS and made Yautja bucks WORK to keep their place in the bower because weak, stupid matrons produced weak, stupid pups.)

 **Mall Time with Puck**

Puck slouched in grumpy silence through the high-end Mall stores with Aunt Raina.

Puck then slouched in grumpy silence through the lower-end Mall stores.

Ditto the medium, which included Target.

Every time Raina would hold something up that she thought her mumbling niece might like, Puck would mutter an excuse and ignore everything, hands deep in the pockets of her Mike's borrowed Carhart work jacket, staring down at her worn Doc Martins with the toes cut out to accommodate her cat's feet, complete with doodles on the sides and knotted laces.

"How about this nice dress for special occasions?"

Puck turned her head, barely looking at the dress, mumbling. "Ketchup."

Raina sighed. Puck ate very rarely, so ketchup stains were obviously a copout. NOT that she blamed her: why eat when an extension cord or an hour in sunlight was just as good?

"How about this?"

"No."

"This?"

"No."

"Ummmmm… this?" Back in _Forever 21_ , Raina held up a pair of black leggings that could be easily altered to accommodate Puck's tail and a bright aquamarine lace top with a scoop neck and bell sleeves to go with it.

"Definitely _no_."

Desperate, Raina dragged her neice into the locally owned skater store next to _Forever 21_ , and actually got a slight flicker of interest with the more casual, unisex clothes before Puck said, eyeing her warily. "Two outfits outta five ain't bad, _right?"_

Either Puck had very selective taste, or she'd inherited her Uncle Mike's frugality.

Crap, not the cheapskate gene! Few things in the world were as cheap as Mike Schmidt, who owned precisely two shirts (one a faded plaid flannel work shirt, the other the ratty Marine Corps t-shirt he wore to mow the Stein's lawn in), two pairs of pants (both Carhart), one pair of cutoffs, underwear and socks that needed burning, and a stained second-hand Carhart work jacket with patched elbows that one of the Wolf brothers had given him as partial payment for a bit of off the books contracting.

Otherwise, if it wasn't provided by whatever employer he was working for, it didn't exist.

"Of COURSE!" Raina yelled loud enough to make Puck jump backwards and sideways like a cat on YouTube's early days when that was the only thing on. "Why didn't I think of THAT?"

Puck stared at her suddenly wide-eyed and very bushy-tailed.

Raina practically dragged her to the Goodwill superstore a block down from the Mall in her sudden epiphany.

 **Mall Time with Maggie**

Mean.

Mean.

Mean.

Why was Uncle Mike so mean? And selfishly cheap? There had been lots of money in that pouch he'd hidden under that brick – so what if it was supposed to buy them away from Charlie? There was certainly enough there for pretty clothes, awesome shoes, and fabulous accessories.

Cheapskate! (And it's not like Charlie knew where they were!)

The Mall was supposed to be a temple of pleasure, not a place where every store she set foot in with her glowering Uncle Mike on the heels of her Jimmy Choos was just one more humiliating goodbye to her precious clothes – clothes that let her forget what she really was. Oh sure, she could keep whatever couldn't be returned, but that wasn't good enough.

Stupid, stupid Uncle Mike; making her take her fabulously pretty clothes back for the money!

Stupid, stupid Aunt Raina for being mean and LETTING HIM!

And most of all? Stupid, stupid _twin sister_ for TELLING!

Wanting to cry but not, (because crying isn't fabulous and ruins your mascara.) Maggie eyeballed with lust a pretty white dress with pink frills and a red lace top with a price tag that would have given her uncle a heart attack had he not been running on batteries and looked away when he glowered down at her.

And why, oh WHY, WHY did Uncle Mike have to wear his cop's uniform? It wasn't like she'd _shoplifted_ all this fabulousness! The crowd she ran with wouldn't have stood something so, so VULGAR as STEALING – if you can't flash cash, why bother?

At least she got to keep the iPhone 7 Draculaura had given to her as a birthday present.

Now THAT had been humiliating. Her usually easygoing Uncle Mike had marched her straight to the Tepes's house up the street. Freshly shaven, he'd stood ramrod straight behind her in his uniform, face blank as Mr. Tepes (what a cutie!) explained that there was no need to worry, the phone was part of a package deal that Tepes had recently bought into – the bill was covered for the next two years, and the clothes with the Paris and Tokyo labels were also gifts – would Maggie like to come with the Tepes the next time they went on a shopping trip to Milan?

Ears almost purple, Uncle Mike had thanked Mr. Tepes for clearing this up for him, and then ushered her into the Stein's borrowed SUV, the back piled high with clothes and shoes, most of them still unworn and in the original bags, the rest on hangers with the tags on them.

Frankie who'd unintentionally walked in on the row over stolen family money, blushingly admitted that perhaps she was to blame. She had her own baby-sitting money and it had been so much fun spending money she'd earned herself that MAYBE she'd encouraged Maggie to overspend money that didn't even belong to her… and were they REALLY runaways? She thought Abraham Lincoln had answered that question! Anyway, she was really, really sorry for the trouble – how could she ever make up for it?

The stop at the Wolf house had been almost as bad – Clawdeen Wolf, standing between her mom and dad with her pack of siblings milling around behind her, proudly explained that the clothes from her didn't even _come_ from a store but were originals she'd made herself from stuff from the Jo-Anne's Fabric's clearance rack and the Salvation Army – they looked great on the sketch pad and her tailor's dummy but awful on Clawdeen. So, she'd given the ones that looked good on Mags, to Mags!

In front of Ramses de Nile, a lot of staring cats, and the house servants, Cleo dismissivly admitted that she'd given Maggie some of the clothes and shoes without tags because they simply didn't suit her. Returning things was dead common and therefore, beneath her.

Melody's family (thank GOD!) wasn't even home, having gone down to L.A. for the weekend to visit family and shop.

It had all been _v. V._ humiliating!

Maggie couldn't wait to get to her Instagram and Snapchat stories and complain to the only people that mattered: her adoring fans.

It was mostly safe now, right?

Uncle Mike wasn't looking, right?

He was too busy nursing a cup of cheap McDonald's coffee (Would it have killed him to spare her the embarrassment and AT LEAST pour it into a Starbuck's cup?) in the café court at a different table while they waited for Aunt Raina and her biach of a twin sister to get back from the Goodwill (Oh god, more humiliation!) – what would it hurt?

 **Goodwill, the world's most exclusive boutique.**

Goodwill had been a slick move on Raina's part – Puck immediately relaxed in the stale sweat and antiseptic-smelling garishly lit superstore the second she stepped through the arthritic automatic sliding doors.

Truth be told, Raina was more comfortable here, too.

Being the youngest of seven raised on a Navy paycheck, Goodwill had been more a part of her life than anybody who'd seen _Top Gun_ and _Officer and a Gentleman_ would ever guess. Yeah, dad had been a hot shot Navy fighter pilot and then Top Gun instructor, but even an officer's scratch only got you so far even with Tricare, BX shopping, and Base housing to help cover the tab with seven mouths to feed, house, and clothe.

Between Goodwill, and hand-me-downs from her brothers and wealthier parts of the family, she'd looked pretty good – you just had to be fussy about what you bought so that nobody'd know you were wearing last year's top and shoes that had flown off of the clearance rack only to land in the land of questionable bargains if only you were patient enough to dig.

Anyway, nobody ever went hungry. Eventually her dad rose high enough up the totem pole at Top Gun to warrant one of the coveted houses overlooking the Pacific, so it all worked out.

"How much do I have to spend?" Ignoring the indiscreet stares of the clerk behind the register: you just didn't see RADS in the Goodwill, Raina looked over at Puck, warily eyeballing the rack of clothing beside the checkout stand.

"Sorry kid, but $100 is all we can afford if you want that iPhone. Even with me working full time, we don't make that much if we're going to buy ourselves from Charlie." Merston High was on the rich side of Salem. Maybe it was time to move out of the Stein's guest house and transfer to a lower income-district. The facilities might not be as nice, but the pressure to show up every day looking like a _Spiegel_ catalog model might not be as intense.

"$100? Awesome!" Raina blinked. The kid's resemblance to Mike was uncanny, even with the cat-ears and whiskers. Trying not to let on she'd been staring, Raina nodded, grinning.

"Welcome to the world's most exclusive boutique – anybody can shop here!" she quipped, borrowing the line from her father. He'd found every visit humiliating, but what the hell was he supposed to do? Raina dug around in her flight jacket pocket and handed Puck a small calculator, "Here, keep a running total so you don't overspend."

"And the cost of getting Uncle Mike's blood out of my leather bomber jacket?" The tall cat-girl looked warily up at Raina who was six foot six in her bare feet.

"I think the school's insurance is covering it. So, go spend like never before. I'll be in the Men's department."

Raina was looking at XXXL shirts and gave a slight start when she realized that Puck was beside her, moving in that silent way of hers. "Find what you want?" she said, recovering herself.

"Mmmmmmm." Puck shrugged – the little shopping cart she was pushing was half full.

"Okay, what is it?" Raina pulled out a blue and white striped chambray shirt that looked like it had never been worn. Three bucks. Nice!

"I got a job."

"Yes, you do." It was a very handsome shirt.

"I want to use the money to buy a motor scooter so I don't have to ride the school bus with the little kids, which sucks because it's loud and smells like pee."

"Yes, I know that." It matched Mike's eyes.

"But if I don't buy the scooter and put all my money into buying our freedom from Charlie, we'd be free _faster_. Right?"

Raina put the shirt back on the rack and stared at Puck. Finally, she said, "Well. Yes. Yes we would. But you could also use the scooter to get to and from work on your own, right?"

"Yeah." Puck said thoughtfully, "Didn't think of that. I found one on Craigslist this morning. It looks almost new. The owner is moving out of state and doesn't want to haul it with him."

"I see." Raina picked the shirt up again. It still had the tags on it and all the buttons were there. Eventually, they'd get to go somewhere nice, and she really wanted to have some of her work friends over. Mike was a very, very handsome man; he couldn't always wear his old Corps t-shirt with the sleeves torn off and pair of Carharts. Raina was pretty easygoing on what her husband wore most of the time, but there were _limits._ Anyway, they'd been invited to one of the Wolf brother's wedding in two weeks – he'd need a suit and tie, too, but getting him into even a Goodwill suit, if they could find one that fit his seven-foot frame would be a battle because that too, cost money.

Money he'd socked away where Maggie couldn't find it or Charlie could trace.

"Do you think Uncle Mike would look at it with me this evening so I don't get screwed? If I decide I want it?" she held out her hand for Raina's used iPhone, "Let me show you the picture – I hope he hasn't sold it yet 'cause it's really cool!"

Raina let Puck take the phone and made a decision: the shirt was going home with them. Mike would wear it when they had people over, period. She dropped it into Puck's shopping cart along with a solid blue one – there was a sale; she'd get two nice shirts for the price of one. Puck showed her the scooter on the little screen.

It was nice, hopefully not stolen – but Mike could look into that for Puck. This in mind, Raina hemmed and hawed before saying, "Tell you what, we'll both take you over there this evening IF the guy's in and IF it hasn't sold yet, and look it over for you. If it's the real deal, you can ride it home – but you gotta pay in cash like we always do, right?"

"Right, thanks!" Puck gave Raina a restrained hug, the first one she'd ever gotten from her niece.

 **Father Tom**

After dinner, Father Tom finally gave in to the nagging feeling he'd had ever since he'd seen what few pictures there had been of the school shooting in the local news and pulled out a scrapbook from his days as a Navy chaplain.

Father Tom flipped through decades of clippings. There. Near the front of the book - he was right!

He'd been standing talking to one of his regulars, a chopper pilot on the front steps of the little Base chapel.

Father Tom squinted: it was the woman who'd been slipping in and out of his church once or twice a week these last few months, it had to be, only her hair was a bright indigo blue.

Remembering a morning twenty-four years before further down the West Coast, he remembered that she, or someone who looked uncannily like her, had brought a "friend" – a tall blonde Marine in a badly-fitting white short-sleeved shirt that looked ready to split at the shoulders, a too-short tie, and highwater black slacks. He'd stood when everybody else sat and sat when everyone stood, before singing along with Father Tom until he realized that nobody else was singing and abruptly shut it, ears crimson. The kneeler hadn't fared well under the jarhead's huge, nearly seven-foot bulk, either, and he was obviously embarrassed when everyone else got out their rosaries until his "friend" shared hers, patiently guiding him through the stations.

Clearly Protestant, he'd persisted, blushing and sweating harder and harder through the Mass, standing out like a sore thumb, only to doze off halfway through the announcements and start snoring until she'd dug an elbow in his side.

After Mass, the chopper pilot had shown the big man off like a new baby to Father Tom as they stood there on the front steps, the wind blowing raw off the Pacific that morning while some kid took their picture as part of a school assignment.

The kid had proudly given Father Tom a print. Father Tom had graciously put it in his scrap book.

And here it was, nearly two decades later.

It was the same couple.

It had to be.

But they hadn't aged, they both should be in their mid to late 50s by now.

What was going on here?

 **Wall of Honor**

Scrape. Splat.

Scrape. Splat.

Scrape. Splat.

Patador put down the mason's trowel and held out one huge taloned hand.

Ruby, his little daughter, handed Pat another colored wine bottle from the stack beside the wall he was building at the back of the abandoned factory turned bower.

He lay the bottle on the wet cement, and used the mason's trowel to set the bottle so that the light of the rising sun would shine through it and the several hundred others he'd already placed, spattering the floor and surrounding walls with a blaze of colored light. The fact that he'd figured out on his own how to angle the bottle mouths just right so that the wind would play simple tunes on them was something Pat was immensely proud of.

Coming from a race that built nothing for itself, (Why bother when you could stomp up to a different species and snarl at them until they built it for you?) this was truly an architectural marvel for the ages.

All to impress Sargent.

Satisfied, the short, squat Yautja stepped back, surveying his latest masterpiece. It was amazing what you could find on YouTube for free – that DIY bricklaying channel was mandible rattlingly BRILLIANT!

Anyway, the family needed a bigger trophy rack now that the boys had been kicked out of the bower and would soon be bringing home new ones. This was something that no other bower had. Pat held out his hand once more. The little ooman pup, what was her name? Marlys? Slapped one of the rare blue bottles across his massive palm and stood back in awe while he decided where this treasure would go.

Once he finished the glowing musical trophy rack, there was a DIY channel that specialized in woodworking that needed exploiting. That Woodwright guy had a lot of interesting ideas. Ideas that Pat had decided to try out the first chance he got to use up his huge stash of _Harbor Freight_ coupons. (It was amazing what oomans threw away - coupons were practically MONEY!)

A shrill peep echoed through the massive indoor space.

A Yautja ship had entered the system. It had been a while. Did they require assistance?

Pat calmly responded with, "No, the hunting is so good we are staying another season." and reset the proximity alarm.

Anyway, he couldn't wait until sunrise tomorrow so that he could show off his work.


	20. Leadership

_Somewhere in Salem_

 _As the Maze, once again bored and forsaken moped around looking for a playmate somewhere in the night, Tepes watched Officer Sargent's bodycam footage from the day of the shooting._

 _He then replayed a certain segment.  
_

 _Over and over._

 _Officer Schmidt had more than fulfilled his duty, as anticipated. Tepes wasn't studying Jimmy Spencer and his cousin Dakota's part in the appalling debacle, either._

 _Left with two rather messy dead bodies, and therefore unable to take his vengeance on them directly, Tepes found that Jimmy and his moronic partner in crime's families more than adequate targets once the dust settled and the press found some other tragedy to mob._

 _Back in the day, everyone even remotely related to the two fools in search of immortality would have been impaled in a very public place, all the way down to the babies. When you rule over an illiterate population, you want any and all of your messages to be read by the people as easily as possible: "Touch not what is mine or face the consequences."_

 _End of story._

 _Unable to do what came naturally because times and attitudes change, the former Voivode of Wallachia sued the families of both delinquents so deeply, so thoroughly, that had they so much as wished to purchase a pack of gum or take a shit, they would have to clear it with his legal team first._

 _As to the absurd masks both youths had been wearing, the FBI reported that the Halloween masks turned gas-masks had been intended as racial slurs. Further investigation of the boy's Facebook and Twitter accounts indicated that RADs had been their primary targets, first at Merston High, and then down the street at nearby Tepes Elementary School._

 _Another lawsuit was piled onto the teetering stack; this time with Federal involvement: their actions, in addition to domestic terrorism, were stamped with the phrase, "hate crime"._

 _No, Jimmy and his cousin weren't the problem on the screen: Jeff had slipped his leash once again._

 _That was easy: have his medications shuffled and reshuffled until he was safely, chemically subdued until needed._

 _No, the real problem was Officer Schmidt's niece, what was her name? Puck? Marion? No matter. Her fraternal twin, Margaret was one of Draculaura's best friends, and a giggling little fool more interested in shoes than in breathing. Puck, however, bore watching. Officer Sargent had subdued her, but not easily._

 _Puck needed a minder while Tepes decided what to do about her._

 _And he knew just the proxy for the job._

 _Tepes gave a thin smile, and texted Slenderman._


	21. Algebra I

_Nowhere in particular._

 **And now for a little math, or "How to Make a True Monster".**

The formula for a "true" monster is as follows: M=c+t x MI

To find M, start with c (childhood) and add it to t (trauma). Then calculate for MI, (mental illness). This is because what goes on in the grey matter of a child deeply affects the outcome of the monster you create. C is a very fickle variable but has common traits:

° a broken home

° alcoholism/addiction

° molestation

° untreated brain trauma

° unaddressed sexual/mental/neurological issues such as homosexuality, Asperger's, Autism, ADHD, schizophrenia, whatever.

Add to the above: overall general neglect/abuse/powerlessness/excessive shaming in early childhood/addiction – heyyyyy, you're really cookin' with gas!

(Remember students, quality, or rather the LACK of quality x the more violent "c" is in plain sight, the more spectacular the monster, I mean, look at John Wayne Gacy and Patrick Wayne Kearney!)

This established, let us start with a simple problem.

 **Step One:** Plug in the variables.

M= bad initial childhood (check all that apply): abusive father, teen mother + divorce + a new dad who's not much better equals Grade D early childhood + highly conservative, overbearing parent/s (practically breeding monsters on the spot) + head trauma, (say, how about involuntary involvement in a car accident resulting in an untreated concussion at the age of thirteen leading to an altered personality with accompanying frequent mood swings?) x any pre-existing mental conditions/physical issues, some of them hereditary?

 **Step Two.** Follow through the formula. Remember folks, if you do it right, you too can have your very own terrifying creature on the loose. If you are lucky, you are miles away or already dead before your creation can get at you.

 **Step Three:** Put down your pencil and look at the pretty monster thus created:

It is:

° A dehumanizing killing machine capable of destroying anything in its way because if it's not "him" it is to be disposed of in whatever manner is the most satisfying, making it a danger to anything and anyone given the right circumstances.

° Once the barrier of common decency has been broken, it will continue fulfilling homicidal urges to give itself relief from whatever it is that's going on inside its head with ever increasing frequency. Oddly enough, it can also be quite charming and manipulative.

° Speaking of charming and manipulative, it is also a narcissist, abusing anyone who might prove a threat in order to keep itself on top while blaming others for its actions when caught.

° And the best part? It is as human as you or I.

 **Extra Credit** it will sometimes partake in self-destructive behaviors, including scarring itself to fill a void while making itself more threatening. But not always. But this one definitely does.

So, rest easy tonight knowing that you have just used a simple formula to create a terrifying creature that will gain hundreds of fangirls and groupies who don't seem to see what the rest of the world sees, and we can all thank you for that.

And so, students, for now, go to sleep. It won't hurt too much if you don't see it coming.


	22. Back on the Job

_Salem, Oregon, the first week of October 201-_

 **Morning at Camp**

 _Life is an elaborate piñata. Only for some, once broken open, all that falls out is someone else's half-eaten jelly donut in your least favorite flavor and three mouse turds._

 _Toby's life piñata went one step further. In addition to the aforementioned unappetizing pastry and mouse excrement, Toby's piñata also contained the smelly remains of the mouse that produced the turds._

 _And a very large and friendly slug that acted like a big, happy dog. Today was no exception:_

"W-w-w-why c-c-c-can't someone else g-go?" Toby mumbled half-asleep and wanting to set something on fire.

Or punt a squirrel.

How about both? At the same time? So that the entire surrounding forest burned down, preferably taking somebody's nice house with it?

Better yet, how about the entire fucking city of Salem? No, too small. How about OREGON?

Along with all of Oregon's squirrels.

Yeah, that works. Only too bad the squirrels in the area knew to avoid Toby, because bad news like Toby gets around fast.

And wholesale arson was out - it'd been a pretty wet year so far.

So, Toby settled for axing the small alarm clock that was so old it still used a hammer, two bells, and a bent key.

Black-brown eyes still closed, Toby shoved his hunting orange-handled hatchet back beneath his pillow and sat up in the new bed in the little cabin he didn't have to share with anybody (Or anyTHING for that matter – talking to YOU Mr. Widemouth!), now that he was going back to high school and needed his sleep. Pulling the yellow goggles off of his head from where he had forgotten them the night before, Toby grumbled and stumbled over to the small bureau and rummaged through the freshly washed clothes. He pulled out his favorite shirt, glad that he had slept already half-dressed because it was hard to find privacy in camp.

Running into the dining hall with his backpack full and his stomach empty, he met S'diya, the camp nurse, who was going to a local community college for a basic nursing education somewhere in town.

"Real proud u' ya, sugar, fer decidin' t'go t'school again." S'diya set a plate of EGGO waffles in front of him, mostly because very few people at Camp woke up this early, and she was the only one other than LuLu that was allowed around anything heat or cooking related. She cracked open the last can of milk before the supply truck came on Wednesday and poured it into a mug of instant coffee for him. Toby marveled at the tiny sharks that only he could see as they screamed and sank into the swirling depths of the dark liquid filled mug.

While sliding Toby a spoon and his morning meds across the battered table, S'diya dumped the leftover milk into her tea with her secondary set of hands. Shakily, he popped them in one at a time, washing them down with a second cup of bean juice. He finished by shoveling the crispy, unseasoned waffles into his mouth, grabbed his backpack, and jogged a mile to the nearest housing development to get onto the coughing, rattling bus, which made him want his mask again while remembering every goddam nickname he'd been called when he was still in school. That had been before his mother decided to home school him at age eight because the Apostle had told her Toby was being corrupted by worldly things such as homosexuality and Darwinism – worldliness was why Toby had Tourette's.

And stuttered.

And twitched.

That, and not praying enough.

At least the jolting ride covered up Toby's spastic convulsions and he was allowed to walk home at the end of the day.

 **First day on the job.**

Fitzie had to admit, that if this was really a job, it was great.

So far all he'd had to do was wear a vest with the Merston High mascot (A scallion, or green onion with an aggressive expression on its face) embroidered on it and sleep on a big dog bed in Merston High school colors (electric blue, hot pink, purple, and black) in front of Ms. Goode's desk in the office across the hall from Mike's tiny one.

The one that Mike had to share with the janitorial sink. And a rack of mops.

That, and fart.

And occasionally sneeze.

Best of all everybody wanted to pet him and tell him what a good dog he was.

Which was gratifying.

When he wasn't doing that, Fitzie slept in the Special Needs department down the hall, with the special needs kids when he wasn't escorting them up and down the hall to help keep them calm.

They enjoyed petting him, too.

As for sharing an office with Ms. Goode, well, you can't have everything.

 **Clueless Mentor**

Mike, Officer Schmidt looked out of his tiny office and closed his eyes.

He opened them. They were still there.

Kneeling.

The Sargent brothers.

One to each side of his office door, one fist on the tiles, the other on their hips, face masks gleaming while partially blocking the hallway in between classes.

They'd been doing this ever since he'd been cleared for duty.

It was getting on his nerves.

Oh sure, they'd leave for class, but between classes,? Welp, there they were!

They even followed him to the staff lounge where he liked to sit in peace, plugged into the wall for a quick recharge while drinking coffee at ten.

They followed him into the gym after school when they weren't at football practice, where he was an assistant coach, taking up the same pose on either side of him when he tried to teach boxing to the newly formed team. Finding them gloves that fit and sending them off to the side to spar with each other had helped get them out from underfoot.

They ran along each side of his Goldwing to and from work, regardless of the weather. They seemed to enjoy the rain, tipping their heads way back, mandibles fanned, funneling water directly into their razor-sharp tooth lined maws, gurgling in what sounded like pleasure after each run, rain dripping from their sodden dreads.

They weren't human, they didn't know human ways, he didn't want to hurt their feelings, blah blah blah, but damn! Did they have to camp out in the bushes behind the house every night no matter what the weather? Did their parents know what they were up to? Should he report this as neglect even if their mother was a fellow cop?

As for the following and doorway business, Officer Schmidt checked the school handbook. Annoying as the boys were, they weren't breaking any rules.

But the nightly flexing and rattling outside the girl's bedroom window? Raina, raised with six older brothers recognized that for what it was before he did. No matter how bizarre looking, a teenage boy was a teenage boy and she wasn't having _any_ of it. Armed with a rolled-up newspaper, she marched outside and around the guest house where the two brothers were taking turns lifting each other over their heads as Puck and Maggie giggled, shouting "No, just NO!"

The now very subdued two slunk forty feet back and quietly resumed flexing and rattling. Raina spent the rest of the night snarling something about better safe than sorry under her breath before ordering Mike to put one-way plastic film on all the windows.

At least he now knew where the stabbed footballs were coming from, but why?

Needing to make his morning rounds, Officer Schmidt picked up his clipboard and stepped up, over, and around the hulking twins.

Barely controlling himself, Officer Schmidt turned around, saying in a monotone voice. "That's enough for today, you two. Go! Learn something!" (Mentally adding, "Somewhere else!")

 **Learn something.**

At last! At last! Their mentor had given them an order after testing their patience for so long – his order told them that they'd succeeded in obedience.

Fredator pulled a tightly folded piece of paper out of the back pocket of his sagged jeans and opened it.

It announced that today, after school, they were holding auditions for the spring play. This year it was to be "Romeo and Juliet".

He'd already read through the script once. Now he would finish memorizing it so that he could attack the lead role of Tybalt the great, tragic hero, head on. With enough arm twisting and head banging, Tedator would play the role of Tybalt's spear carrier, Romeo.

Not only that, Fredator would supply his own weapons – maybe their mother would be willing to lend him a few skulls from her trophy rack for added authenticity?

That, and a few stun grenades.

As for Tedator, Officer Schmidt's order obviously meant he had to pay attention in Math for Jocks.

Damn.

 **Romeo, Romeo, where art thou, Romeo? I'm in the can, stupid!**

Tina couldn't wait for school to be over for the day: she'd finally decided it was time to step out in style by auditioning for the school play.

She thought Juliet would do nicely.

And she had exactly the right red velvet fabric and a blonde wig, too.

Somebody had tossed a perfectly good set of velvet curtains into the town landfill. She'd found them while looking for enough matching china plates and silverware for her and her friends (well, those that actually ate) to eat lunch off of in the cafeteria because Styrofoam trays and plastic forks weren't only bad for the environment, but utterly, completely gauche.

This was going to be sooooooo cool!

 **Just another sisterly spat, or "The Devil's Swing"**.

 _"I'm the dancing demon, watch me twirl and hop and spin, I'm quick to give a smile, but I won't forget your sins."_

Sprawled out under a sunlamp on a futon in her shared room after school, Puck began scratching down the cartoon classic's intro that Maggie had at some point loved and had been inspired by. Speaking of which, Puck was watching a black and white Bendy and Boris running around with Alice Angel in a dance hall.

 _"Despite this mask of happiness, I drown in dark despair, The world may be your canvas, what you paint on it, beware!"_

Maybe later she would watch _Betty Boop_. Better yet, a _Silly Symphony—_ she'd found an entire cache of ones she'd never seen on YouTube. Maybe Maggie would watch them with her.

Maggie used to love vintage cartoons, the older the better. Only after coming to Salem and discovering clothes, not so much.

 _"The pen truly is mightier than the sword, it has no limitation to wha…?_

"Yo. Biach."

Annoyed, Puck looked up from her notebook. Maggie had turned off the world's tiniest television and was now trying to stare down a very disinterested cat.

Puck, the cat, pointedly turned her back on Maggie, the fox, out of general sisterly hostility and a desire not to get into it.

Again.

In return, Maggie attempted to burn holes in the back of Puck's newly sculpted head with her golden eyes.

Irritated and STILL in no mood for a confrontation, Puck began doodling Bendy's antics in the margins of her beat-up notebook.

Maggie yanked the notebook out of hand's and started flipping through it, a sneer on her foxy face.

"Hey!" Puck started to snatch it back, but Maggie hurled the shabby notebook out into the hallway while attempting to grab Puck by the sleeve.

Evading her sister's grasp, Puck fell back onto the futon. Thwarted, Maggie crossed her arms and pouted, tail stiffly erect with anger.

"What the actual HELL Puck?" she whined.

"Huh?" Puck was genuinely confused by this new confrontation. This morning it had been all about how unfair it was that Puck had a motor-scooter to ride to work and school while Maggie _didn't._ Even pointing out that Puck had a JOB, had PAID for the little black scooter with her OWN MONEY and could PAY for the GAS and didn't just use it to cruise around town wasting fuel, didn't end the argument. All Maggie cared about was that Puck had one and SHE DIDN'T.

Which wasn't FAIR.

Oh, goody.

"My friends can't stop talking about you now that you have your own central nervous system. Melody won't shut up about what a poor, sad friendless thing you are and that we should include you, while Frankie keeps saying how well she designed your new ears and tail even if she wasn't allowed to give you a full makeover!" Maggie flushed. "And, and, you're not even PRETTY. They're MY friends, not YOURS!"

Ears flat, Puck glared up into her fraternal twin's face, saying, "So, you're pissed 'cause you're no longer in the spotlight because you aren't very interesting or original 'cause your self-important rich bitch friends are noticing li'l ol' ugly me? Keep 'em! Anyway, Melody's an idiot, all Frankie cares about is shoes, and Draculaura is a pointless little dingbat!" Puck would have added what she thought about Clawdeen (who was kinda cool because she made all her own clothes and they were as good as store bought if not BETTER). As for Cleo...

Maggie squealed, "I'm telling Uncle Mike you're being mean to me again!" while stomping out of the room, knowing that Puck had won the war once again before she could dump napalm onto the steadily growing wildfire between them.


	23. Wednesday

_Merston High, Salem Oregon, mid-October, 201-_

 **Knock Knock**

 _When Helen Goode was six years old, Ralph Krenwinkle, aka. Desert Storm the peace activist who lived across the street with his elderly parents, somehow figured out that her father had done a tour of duty in Viet Nam._

 _Something Helen's father rarely if ever talked about._

 _He wanted to keep his hard-won job on the assembly line._

 _He had a family to feed, bills to pay, and a house to finish paying off._

 _And a year stolen from his life that he'd just as soon as forget._

 _Every morning, Monday-Friday at 8 sharp, Helen's mother would kiss her father on the cheek, hand him his jacket and lunch box and he would go out to where their battered 1955 DeSoto was parked in its usual pool of oil where he would make eye contact with Desert Sands as a grinning, heavily bearded Desert Storm unzipped the fly of his embroidered jeans and urinated on the DeSoto's dented hood._

 _Helen's father would stare back, a look of dull patience on his freshly shaven face._

 _He and Desert Storm were the same age._

 _Laughing, Desert Storm would shake off the last few drops, tuck back in, and zip up before climbing into his idling VW Beetle with the flowers painted on the hood and the peace symbol painted on the back, and go to the local university, where he was working on a doctorate in Sociology when he wasn't setting fire to things in the name of peace._

 _And her father would get in the DeSoto, start the engine in a cloud of smoke, and drive to work._

 _One morning, as Helen watched from the front porch steps, Desert Storm didn't saunter over with his usual grin to do his part for peace._

 _Instead, he was trying to get the Beetle started._

 _The Beetle, wasn't interested. He'd left the lights on over-night; the battery was flat as a pancake._

 _Helen's father wordlessly got out the jumper cables, started the DeSoto, and crept it over to the Beetle._

 _In a few minutes, the Beetle was clattering to life, and Helen's father was on his way to work._

 _The next day, Desert Storm, hose out, was back at it._

 _Forty-six years later, Helen suddenly remembered this._

 _And that maybe, just maybe she and Desert Storm had a lot more in common than she realized._

 _This was when, in Merston High's faculty parking lot, Student Resources Officer Schmidt was changing a flat for her unasked after most of the parking lot had emptied for the day and it was raining._

 _The jack was broken, and Gerald or Ubuntu had always taken care of these things for her._

 _She'd stood there in the cold and damp trying beneath her umbrella, trying to figure out the instructions in the operator's manual until Schmidt walked up and one-handedly raised the small car enough to slip a cement block under the frame before wordlessly changing the tire._

 _As he tightened the lug nuts on the spare, feeling talkative, she'd asked, "You were in the Marines?"_

 _Schmidt sort of grunted in the affirmative, checking the tire pressure._

 _"Were you in the Middle East?"_

 _A nod. Another non-committal grunt._

 _And then it fell out of her mouth, landing between them like a fresh, steaming turd: "What's it like to murder the innocent?"_

 _Ears suddenly dark red, Schmidt abruptly stood, staring down at her with rain running down his face, one huge hand lifting the frame of the small car as one large foot kicked the cement block aside._

 _It was the same look of dull brute patience her father had given Desert Storm every morning until Desert Storm graduated with his Doctorate and accepted a professorship in Social Sciences at Berkeley, eventually becoming a Department Head and retiring with honors._

Helen Goode knocked on the SRO's office door the following morning before the first bell, and asked if she might come in.

Only by the time he'd opened the door, she'd fled out of embarrassment, leaving him to wonder what was going on.

 **New Kid at School.**

Not even a full hour in at the worst fucking high school ever, and Toby already wanted to hack himself to pieces with his own axe that he sadly was not allowed to bring

That, or rip the head off of a squirrel and use the bloody stump to write something horrible but profound on the boy's bathroom mirror. (How about, _"Mene mene tekel upharsin_ "? That should cause an uproar!)

But as usual, all local members of the _Sciurus family_ had gone into deep hiding so that Toby had to settle for recalling his experience at Merston so far instead;

For starters, he'd been greeted by a bunch of cheerleaders the second he got off the school bus. They were, (get this) all RADs— who immediately wanted to know _what_ he was – RUDE!

He'd glowered so they'd back off, only to have his 'tude ruined by a violent neck-popping twitch. Unintimidated, the two smaller ones wanted to know what just happened, and if he was okay, and where he was he from, blah, fucking blah-blah-blah.

Then the tall blonde with cat's ears and a tail, the one he was supposed to befriend to see if she belonged at the Camp, came striding out of the nearby student parking lot, a motorcycle helmet under one arm and rolling her eyes as a dowdy middle-aged woman wearing what looked like a burlap skirt scurried after her, blattering on about the benefits going totally vegan while dragging a large, ugly dog that reminded Toby of behind her on a leash so that Toby'd had to run to catch up with them as they entered the building between the twin metal detectors at the front door and the big dumbass looking cop operating them.

 _Fuck this shit!_

Obviously, stringbean agreed with Toby and quickly jogged on into the school, leaving Mrs. Quack Quack and the ugly dog to scurry through the security system on their own as Toby, trudging and twitching towards his inevitable doom, was so involved with his bad mood that he didn't notice that Mrs. Quack Quack come up beside him.

"Hello, I'm Ms. Goode, the Diversity Advisor." She was exactly his size. Gee, big surprise there – ha! Toby sped up, pretending he didn't hear her.

The world's ugliest mutt had other ideas.

"Hey man, don't ignore the dudette." It bit onto his pant leg and pulled, forcing Toby to face the reality that like it or not, he was going to meet this lady face to face. He turned and glared at her.

She almost, but not quite flinched as she stepped back saying, "Hello, I'm Ms. Goode."

"Oh, you poor thing." Toby replied. "Can I have my leg back?"

Hating dogs even more than usual, especially talking ones, Toby attempted to edge away while shaking off Muttley. But no luck. The creature had jaws like a bear trap, so he settled for standing cracking his knuckles while giving her a blank stare.

"You must be Tobias Erin Rogers, our new mid-semester enrollment. Welcome to Merston High." Ms. Goode said brightly, quickly fading into a nervous smile before adding in a much more subdued tone, "According to the transfer paper papers we received last week, you'll also be part of the special needs program. There's also a few gaps in your enrollment forms that require filling in. So, if you'll come with me, let's get that taken care before the first bell rings, right?"

 **Profile**

"It says here that you identify as a RAD."

Toby Rodgers sat in front of Quack Quack (Ms. Goode's) desk and Miss Bruntford who might have been some sort of administrator trying to hold back every curse word his father ever used on Toby while beating him in one of his usual drunken rages, "However, by state and federal law, you are not required to defend this identity."

Toby chewed his lip before responding to the fat woman's unanswered, unspoken, and possibly illegal question with an uncontrollable splat of words accompanied by a violent jerk of his head.

"I'm sorry, would you mind repeating that?" Fatso, whose ass overwhelmed the chair she was sitting in stated in a flat voice.

Toby took a long, hard, deep breath. The more clearly he could enunciate, the faster he'd get the hell out of this. He opened his mouth, struggling to shove his increasing spasms into the background: "I am technically considered a RAD by the one drop rule. My great-great grandfather (jerk) on my mother's side (jerk) was (jerk) s-s-s-s-s-s-something." (Exactly WHAT that something had been, it had been extremely fast if the family stories were to be believed.

He rubbed his gloved hands together, wishing nothing more than to jump out a window and set the place ablaze afterwards, just like he did when _that_ happened.

Quack Quack gave him a kindly smile which made him want to barf all over her Birkenstocks because it was so goddam fake. Instead of hurling half-digested EGGOs all over the office, Toby's left foot decided to kick the desk before it let him slump into his chair to study the dent he'd left behind.

"I see." Tub o' Guts Bruntford, who stank like an unwashed ashtray and bad memories said, adding, "Your legal guardian, Miss S'Diya, has also requested for you to be placed in our special needs program, but once more, never specified any reasons. May we send the paperwork home with you at the end of today for completion, or would you prefer we mailed them to the address we have on file?"

Caught up in the stench of old, bad memories, Toby thought, "Damn, Tepes didn't tell me there would be paperwork involved!"

"We have the basic information, we just need more plus her signature so we can begin the testing process in order to best determine how to meet your needs by Oregon and Federal law." Quack Quack said warmly. Yeah, like she really gave a fuck about the twitchy retard!

Toby suddenly sat up straight, leaning back, arm draped over the back of his chair in a way that usually intimidated wet blankets like the two in front of him into leaving him alone. He opened his mouth to say something lame that would make them leave him alone, only to be distracted by a song only he could hear: "Through the sta-tic, on, the teevee, you've watched in hor-ror, as, we're moving."

It was quiet, and about as distant and halting as Toby's brain was at the moment, no thanks to dealing with idiots. He shook his head violently to clear it of the uninvited voice, saying out loud: "Thank you, for playing my games. The nightmares have been real…" The slam of a locker somewhere out in the hall echoed in the sudden silence as the two women stared at him.

Toby's brain made his left leg spasm, bringing him back to reality.

Shit.

Whatever it was, it wasn't done with him: "It's been so long, since, we'd had fun…" His voice drifted off one last time, leaving Toby to wonder if he had imagined the source being out in the hall.

Oh, and just for the hell of it, he switched both women's glasses and dumped the trash on the desk so fast they didn't notice what he'd done until he was out the door and halfway down the hall.

 **Knock Knock**

Once again, Helen Goode knocked on the SRO's office door.

By the time he opened it, nobody was there. Mike shrugged, rolled up his sleeves, and plugged himself back into the wall outlet to finish his lunch.

 **Lunchtime**

Sitting at what was obviously the outcast table on the covered outdoor dining area while gnawing at his raw lips and picking at his gloves, Toby reminded himself that orders were orders: make sure nothing happened to her while making sure she didn't happen to anybody in return.

But did he really have to go back to school? Why couldn't Tepes just put him on the payroll as a janitor so he'd at least get PAID for this shit detail?

All because, according to Slendy, Jeff had set his eye on that girl.

Great.

Toby was not a bodyguard. Toby was the reason people had bodyguards. But here he was, a babysitter and a bodyguard because part of Jeff got hard (and it wasn't Jeff's brain Toby was talking about) around her.

And until they found the right new combination of meds for Jeff, here Toby was, in high school, scoping out a potential new resident for Sanctuary, the Camp for Psycho Scouts, or whatever Tepes called them all because with little or no provocation she'd taken on an opponent three times her size and nearly won during that shooting incident in September.

Tepes didn't need something like that rocking the applecart that was his steadily growing little kingdom in the Cascades.

Fuck.

Fuck.

Fuckitty fuck fuck _fuck._

Sullenly pulling out his lunch bag and putting in ear buds so that he could listen to Del Shannon sing about his little "Runaway", Toby, after stuffing his gloves into his backpack, angrily ripped the meat off of the leftover venison ribs he'd packed the night before, shoving the barely tasted cold, greasy meat into his raw mouth, twitching and muttering to himself.

 **Life Among Outcasts**

"Hey, is that the new kid?"

Puck followed Tina's dark rainbow claw over to the new kid.

"Why's he twitching in our spot?"

"Don't be rude. He's a unique and beautiful individual." Puck knew that it was mean, but she couldn't help mocking Ms. Goode, it was just to _Goode_ an opportunity.

The kid jerked his head to the side involuntarily and continued his barbequed ribs, glaring back at the people staring at him, clearly feeling like Puck on her first day. She almost felt sorry for the guy, especially since Twatwaffle had gone after him for hiding his RADness after he explained the situation.

 _Publicly._

Smiling like a cat while humming a few bars of _Uma Thurman_ she went over and tapped him on the shoulder.

 **Knock Knock**

Once again, Helen Goode knocked on the SRO's office door.

By the time he opened it, nobody was there. Mike shrugged and went back to filling out an incident report from earlier in the day.

 **New Kid, Part Zwei**

A gentle tap on the shoulder startled Toby out of his blissful hatred of everyone on Earth, RAD or not.

He begrudgingly pulled out an earful of Roy Orbison and looked straight into the face of _her_.

"I'm Puck. Tobias, right?"

She smiled widely and held out a hand. Toby quickly wiped off his shaking hand, and pulled on a glove and took it, realizing how strong a grip she had.

"Sorry, I'm still working on my motor skills, so if it hurts…" she trailed off and blushed.

"I can't feel pain." He blurted, a hard twitch wracking his neck, causing it to make a loud crack. It was loud enough to make Miss Bruntford who was smoking outside with them near an open window because it was somewhere between rain and snow and whose sole purpose at the moment was to make sure no one killed anyone in an angsty rage, 'cause Lord knows Toby'd done that…

Mildly concerned, but not enough to put down the coffin nail, Miss Bruntford turned away, continuing to suck down the acrid smoke while pretending to be a dragon.

A sloppy dragon wearing eye-burningly orange polyester doubleknit.

"Toby."

"'K. This is Tina making like Martha Stewart. And that, that's Fred, and Pat." Puck gestured with her head at the three large, ummm, RADs(?!) who dominated the end of the table, their sheer mass causing it to tip slightly in their direction, and sat down next to him. "The Predator brothers. You cool with guts and gore?" she sounded mildly nervous asking that, and blushed harder. "If you aren't, DON'T watch them eat. Trust me."

Guts? Toby twitched his arm hard, and suddenly felt slightly less pissed with his current situation. Gore? He shrugged like an idiot before standing up to carry the bones from his lunch to the nearest outdoor trashcan.

He managed not to stop and stare at the two large RADs in football jerseys pounding down bloody gobbets of lunch by the wobbly handful out of two matching coolers with the Merston High scallion painted on the sides, mandibles dripping red.

Though one of them was reading a script and the other one was hunched over an Algebra textbook, they were eating exactly how he felt: crabby.

"Daaamn, you short!" Toby turned and glared at Puck.

"Wha-What?" (jerk)

"How tall are ya, dude?" Puck looked down at him with a goofy grin. Reminded once more that he lived in the world of giants, Toby twitched, sighed, and then mumbled, "5'6"?"

"Damn, you're almost as tiny as my sister!"

Wanting to shrink into his long sleeve tee with its plain grey hood and stripes, Toby walked past the tall cat girl wearing a heavy Carhart jacket that looked too big for someone so tall, wanting to chuck a squirrel into hot lead just to watch something other than him suffer. Sadly, no squirrels strayed within his reach.

Ditto, hot lead.

 **The Serial Killer in the Room**

Puck sat down next to Toby and got out her new-to-her iPhone, glad that her strange new family had given in and given her. She had the sudden feeling that she had just offended someone. She shrugged it off, hating how her new unaccustomed hormones made her feel, and considered how to best kill lunch hour when she didn't need to eat.

"Here ya go!" Tina smiled, displaying both sets of translucent needle teeth as she handed Puck a charging cord on a cracked but still pretty china plate. "Dig, I mean PLUG in!"

Puck accepted the now Bedazzled cable and stared it.

"You forgot and left it at the table yesterday." Tina said helpfully. "It didn't match the rest of my new china set, so I gave it a makeover."

Crap. Tina was in one of her domestic moods – next thing you know she'll start repainting the semi-outdoor room a more tasteful color. But Puck was too tired from the weird dreams she'd been having the last few nights when fully powered down to be annoyed. Still, having a charging cable would be nice to get that missing hour of sleep back. (Even if it now looked like Christmas had barfed all over New Year's and right back at'cha as Valentine's Day laughed its ass off at both of them for being drunk in public.)

Plugging into the nearest outdoor socket, Puck put on her headphones and sat down while Tina blissfully puttered around her, pulling a full-blown floral centerpiece from a gap in her carapace in the center of the loser's table, followed by a battery-powered candelabra. Blasting her favorite playlist of _Fallout Boy_ and _Imagine Dragons_ Puck began reading _Gone with the Wind_ as her best friend started peacefully setting out a mis-matched but still pretty set of real glass tumblers.

A peace which lasted less than five seconds, ending with Puck slamming the book shut, loudly exclaiming, "OMG, what a _BIMBO – she's wasting her life chasing that creep Ashley Wilkes!"_

Only to realize that the entire table now staring at her, at how loud she'd been.

 _Sorry Dan Reynolds,_ Puck said under her breath. _I need to turn you down, or else I'll get in trouble - again._

Tina, singing like Snow White on a cleaning high was setting out the rest of the real china plates she'd found at the town landfill over the weekend. They and the faded embroidered linen tablecloth she'd found them wrapped in had cleaned up nicely and now set the outcast table off beautifully. If only she could find real flatware – the plastic knives, forks, and spoons the school cafeteria supplied weren't only environmentally unsound, but tacky-tacky- _tacky._ (Like Miss Bruntford's current cheap double knit polyester pantsuit: bright orange. With snags. Along with her usual too-small bright green blouse, the woman positively looked like a PUMPKIN!)

Unaware of Tina's style crisis in progress, a disgusted Puck aimed the book and its stupid heroine at the garbage can. She missed, the disappointing book bounced off of the can to land on the ground with an unsatisfying "thwap".

"Just as well," she said quietly to herself, "I can't concentrate anyway, what with the new baby coming and all." Pouting, the cat girl shoved the iPhone into one of Uncle Mike's Carhart jacket's pockets and unplugged herself as she rose to retrieve it. Miss Bruntford, still smoking, glared daggers at Puck, the stray black hairs on her chin bristling like so many antannae.

Puck sat back down, slipping _Gone with the Wind_ back into her charging bag and replaced it with _Twelfth Night._ Mostly because she'd already survived the ordeal that was _1984_ and didn't care to go through THAT again _–_ totalitarianism? Waaaaaay too much work, brah!Even if the _über_ formal language of the Bard got on her nerves, _Twelfth Night_ was funny and surprisingly strange… sooooooo, like, maybe Shakespeare had been a RAD? And oh yeah, what about the new ba—WTF?

The new kid, what's his face? Toby? Was reading over her shoulder.

 _Too close! Too close!_

"Back off, brah!" Ears flat and tail unconsciously puffed, Puck scooted away on the sticky plastic bench.

Toby, slouching, backed off, saying, "I-I read that once, when M-mom wasn't looking." (click, jerk)

"Mmph." Puck studied the new kid skeptically, one eyebrow cocked. He read _Twelfth Night?_ Yeah, right. And Uncle Mike bought coffee at the gas station on his way to work every morning. Not when he could wait until they poured the two day old coffee down the sink so he could get it for free!

"Yeah, she didn't want me reading it because it was too…too…" Toby looked away, "Gay?" He looked at her from the corner of one eye, waiting for her reaction to his bombshell.

Puck laughed. "Cool, all the more reason to read it!"

Looking relieved, Toby nodded, one foot in its heavy hiking boot slamming into the painted concrete of the outside dining area.

"She also wouldn't let me read _Watership Down._ " He twitched again, "B-because it was gory and because one of the d-does didn't want to be a baby factory. G-guess what I read t-that summer? _TWICE!"_ He grinned with boyish mischief at his ability to sneak things past what sounded like a totally impossible holy-roller of a mother. "That, and _Breakfast of Champions!"_

At _Champions_ , Puck decided to keep Toby, but only so she could keep a large blue cat's eye on him.

 **Knock Knock**

Embarrassed at having Fitzie the dog watching her with large, dark reproachful eyes, Ms. Goode didn't flee this time after knocking.

"Come in."

The SRO officer looked up at her from his little desk in the stuffy little room as with a smooth motion he rolled down both sleeves and tucked his uniform shirt back in, quickly covering his back and shoulders so that she barely caught a glimpse of the tattoos writhing across his skin under the purplish glow of a… was that a grow lamp?

"Yeah?" he studied her, huge hands resting lightly on the desk with its litter of paperwork, pens, and an empty coffee cup with "Semper Fi" on the side.

"I… I…" Ms. Goode cleared her throat.

She cleared it again.

Officer Schmidt cocked his head, one eyebrow raised.

Fitzie impatiently head-butted her from behind.

Without looking Ms. Goode swatted at the dog and quickly blurted out before she could lose her nerve: "I want to apologize for what I said yesterday while you were changing my tire. It was mean and uncalled for."


	24. Harvests

_Halloween Week, Salem, OR, 201-_

 **Blue Plush**

There she was, first thing in the morning as always, the tall, graceful woman in a flight jacket, sitting in the back pew of his church's main chapel.

Sitting quietly.

Father Tom picked up the scrapbook that he'd left in the little vestry and quietly walked towards her up the main aisle as she stood to leave.

"Excuse me, Miss?" he called softly to avoid disturbing the peace of the empty chapel, "May I have a word with you?"

"Mrs. Mrs. Michael Schmidt." Was her quiet response as she turned toward Father Tom. Did she just stuff something dark blue and fuzzy into her pocket?

"Call me Father Tom." Still walking, Father Tom opened the clumsily made book to the page where the uncanny photo resided, "Please, sit down. I only wish to ask you a few questions."

The woman's face closed; she made a quick motion towards the door, only to abruptly stop. "I know it's been a while since my last Confession—"

"No, no, nothing to do with that, Mrs. Schmidt, though if you'd wait a half hour, I open morning confessional?" The tall, elderly priest gestured at the pew she'd just vacated.

"I don't think I'm ready for that just yet." She gave a funny little laugh but sat down anyway.

The two of them sat side by side in silence, the scrapbook on the padded pew between them, staring up at the altar decorated with plastic autumn leaves and real apples, gourds, and pumpkins in honor of the harvest.

Finally, Father Tom took the book, made for him as a gift by the children, now old enough to have children of their own if not grandchildren, involved in the little after-school program he'd sponsored years ago at Naval Air Station Miramar, onto his lap and opened it to the picture of him, the chopper pilot and the Marine on the front steps of the little Navy chapel after a long-ago Mass. He pointed to the pilot and the Marine, "I don't mean to pry, but are those two your parents?"

A little catch of breath; she leaned back, hands deep in jacket pockets, shaking her head, "No. I'm sorry. Those aren't my parents."

Father Tom studied the woman in the picture. The resemblance was uncanny. Even the haircut was the same, shaven sides and temples with the top left long enough to knot at the base of her neck.

Only the woman in the picture's was dark, the woman sitting beside him's was bright blue.

Embarrassed, Father Tom slapped the book shut and stood.

Mrs. Schmidt remained seated, studying the tattered little scrap of plush in her hands as if debating something.

Finally, she looked at one of the nearby stained-glass windows saying softly, "Those aren't my parents."

Fidget.

Fidget.

Fidget.

Still seated, Mrs. Schmidt then looked up at Father Tom, adding: "That's me and my husband, Michael. We're ghosts."

 **Here comes trouble.**

Becca wanted attention.

Becca needed attention…

…to the point of being little more than a cheap ho' in expensive clothing.

A RAD had stolen her boyfriend, (So what if he'd been showing signs of breaking up and had even called her a dumb bitch?) and a RAD had stolen her throne, (even if the RAD had been nicer, but nice wasn't important when you wanted to keep your place on the top of the heap).

Worse, thanks to Frankie Stein opening the floodgates by openly being herself in public, all sorts of RAD trash kept pouring into Salem like so many illegal immigrants and ruining it – diversity, my ass!

Then there were the ones who were clearly normies but claimed RAD-dom just because their great-great grampy maybe, just MAYBE had green skin or wings or like, their second cousin maybe bumped into Sasquatch in the dark on their way to the toilet one night?

Puh-leeeeeeeezzzzz!

It was like those people who claim to be, like Native Americans or black or what-everrrrrrrr come hiring time and quotas had to be filled, when anybody with eyes could tell that was the LAST thing they were – POOOOOOO- _SERS!_

Frankly, RADs were little more than a cold sore on Picture Day.

Watching the RAD popular who'd stolen her rightful place as Queen Bee of Merston high two years ago strut 'round waving her faux Egyptian jewelry in everybody's faces, Becca grabbed what few friends who'd remained after her dethroning, telling them what she intended to do about the ripening cold sore on life's lower lip.

 **Golem Heights**

"Buuuuuurrrrrrrrnnnnn, she sure told you!" Fitzie looked up from his dog bed in Ms. Goode's office. "Not bad for a teeny thing."

Nearly in tears, Ms. Goode sat in her chair, trying to figure out what she'd said to set the new RAD girl off.

All she'd said to the newly arrived RAD, who was literally a china doll was, "I can't believe that you're openly a member of one of the three major human religions, religions known for keeping women and minorities down!"

Gilda Rosenberger, according to her enrollment information was:

a.) a Golem and

b.) a straight A student, and

c.) who played what might be the world's smallest functioning violin on a nearly professional level,

had studied Helen, a devout athiest, carefully over the edge of Helen's desk while replying, "Rebbe Aaron and his brother created me and my family in Dresden before World War II. I am a proud Jewish woman strong in her tradition. I celebrated my _bat mitzvah_ at the age of thirteen as is right - what's your problem?" in a thick German accent.

Ms. Goode had sat there, mouth opening and closing as the tiny porcelain creature carefully climbed down from the chair in front of Ms. Goode's desk, and picked up her tiny backpack, violin case, tiny iPhone, and iPad and left in a leggy swirl of ringlets, old lace, and satin saying, "Please excuse me, I don't wish to be late for my first day in Advanced Calculus."

"You know," the dog added conversationally in his almost but not quite flat voice, "You remind me a lot of mom. She was great at bringing in the awareness and the funding, but when something like me popped up in her activist life, she did not have a fucking clue."

"What?" Startled, Helen Goode leaned over the edge of her desk and stared at her office-mate, who was casually scratching behind one ear with an almost human back foot, releasing a cloud of loose dog hair.

"Asperger's was like, her biggest cause. Poor, _poor_ aspies, nobody wuvs 'em! But when I came along, mom blew it – I wasn't Lady Gaga. I wasn't Madonna. I was not even the Kardashians - she did not know what to do with me! It is all fine and dan-dan-dandy to advocate AWARENESS and RESEARCH and INCLUSION and arrange celebrity fundraisers at $1,000 a plate for somebody else's problem. But when the problem is yours, different story entirely!"

"So, what's that got to do with none of the RAD kids wanting my help?" Helen demanded unaccountably angry even as she digested the names the dog just casually dropped. She was here to help, but nobody wanted it!

"Chill, dudette, chill." Fitzie rolled over on his back, panting, "I am only a dog, but I cannot help but notice that all you see is the RAD and not the PERSON that is the RAD. So, you always have somebody piddling in your 100% natural locally sourced organic minimal carbon footprint artisanal Granola."

"Granola gives me heartburn. And your point?" Helen Goode asked sourly.

"It is like you and Mike, Officer Schmidt. You have this ideal of what a RAD is and is not. When he was not this ideal you pissed all over him like me with a fire hydrant. You went after him for being white, male, and straight because obviously he is privileged, and privilege is bad. You went after him for once being a Marine because obviously that makes him violent and violence is bad. You went after him because of his Cracker accent because obviously having a Cracker accent makes him a racist and being a racist is bad. You see RADS as what YOU think they should be, not what they are: PEOPLE."

"But I'm a trained social worker!" Helen protested. The change class bell rang, the hallway suddenly filled with chattering students, RADS and humans mingling.

"And I am supposed to be house-broken." Fitzie rose, in a jingling of dog tags, "Mind opening the door?" He picked up the end of his trailing leash with his mouth, and through clenched teeth added, "It is nine o'clock. I will be in Special Needs after I take myself for walkies."

Fuming, Helen rose and held the office door open for him.

"Thank you." Fitzie said, adding over one rugose shoulder, "Dudette, you made a good start last week when you apologized to Mike for being an asshole. It meant a lot to him."

The second bell rang as he trotted towards the front door of Merston High, "Mom never apologized. Keep up the good work!" trailing after him in the sudden silence.

 **The Play's the Thing!**

ELA teacher Ms. Daria Morgandorfer hit "SAVE", giving out a deep sigh of relief.

She'd done it.

She'd finally finished casting _Romeo and Juliet_.

With RADs.

Well, mostly.

Because for the first time in the last two years since Frankie Stein had "come out" bringing all sorts of, well, unique individuals with her, RADS outnumbered regular humans at the audition.

Ms. Morgandorfer just hoped she wasn't making a mistake casting Fredator Sargent as Romeo – he'd startled her the day of the auditions by not only knowing the entire script by heart, but by speaking in a voice the BBC would have joyfully claimed as its own when until now all she'd ever heard from him or his twin brother were random clatters and hoots when they weren't hurling footballs at each other between classes. To waste that voice, that ability, no. Just no.

But the bulges. Oh God, the _bulges_.

She'd not insist on the boys wearing tights, though. Daria enjoyed shaking things up, but pants and boots might be less… ummmmm, _controversial._

She cast Tedator as the balcony – as far as she could tell, he didn't have Fred's linguistic gifts, but where you saw one Sargent, you saw the other. Why fight it?

Juliet was the new girl, Gilda. What was she, a golem? Funny, Gilda was dainty, cute, and smart, not at all like the one Daria had seen in the old silent German Expressionist film, all big, dumb, and lumpy. Daria just hoped Tedator as the Balcony didn't accidentally drop and smash the exquisite Gilda into a million little pieces.

How would you even BEGIN to fill out an accident report for something like that?

Speaking of disasters, she decided to drop little Maggie Schmidt as Juliet's feather-brained mother and add her to the stage crew as Assistant Wardrobe Supervisor to Clawdeen Wolf (who always handled that for every production) – the poor kid had stood there, tail limp and ears drooping, stammering her way through Juliet during auditions before bursting into tears - Draculaura Tepes seemed to be more suited for the role of Juliet's mother.

Daria knew the unwritten rules: at least the tiny vampire hadn't stammered during the audition (no, she'd giggled, nonstop), and Mr. Tepes was always good for a few hundred towards set-building as long as they used products from his many businesses with the logos clearly displayed.

Tina Morph, the big girl who ALSO couldn't stop giggling (yes, she clearly identified as a girl, whatever…) was cast as Juliet's earthy nursemaid. Daria hoped Mr. Tepe's little "gifts" would help cover cover the cost of the amount of fabric needed to dress the now over 600 pound, 8-foot tall, ummmmm, whatever it was that Tina _was._

As to the rest? Well, you got what you got in High School theatre and learned to live with it.

Ms. Morgandorfer rose, final casting list hot off the printer and stapler in her hands. She'd tell Ms. Lane the art teacher all about it in the Staff Lounge over their shared afternoon coffee break after posting the list in the hall on the bulletin board beside her classroom door.

Lucky Ms. Lane. She only had to handle sets, props, and costuming.

 **Dead Letter**

SRO Schmidt stared down at the envelope with the southeast Missouri return address on the upper left-hand corner.

It had shown up on his desk earlier in the morning.

He ignored it through his coffee break and recharge.

He ignored it while filling out reports.

He ignored it while ignoring Ms. Goode across the hall trying to make nice-nice.

He ignored it during his lunch hour charging session – opting to read the almost new copy of _Field & Stream _he'd found in the local recycling center last week, instead. Oregon had great fishing, or so the magazine said. (He'd have to give it a try, one of these days.)

He ignored it during his afternoon coffee break and recharge.

And now, the final bell had rung, he had directed traffic out front so that nobody got run over by one of the big yellow busses or got into a fight leaving the student parking lot.

As usual.

The envelope was still there when he got back to sign out and grab his coat and motorcycle keys.

Schmidt sighed, sat down in his office chair, reached for it, picked it up, and slowly opened it, scanning the wobbly handwriting in blue ballpoint: "I saw you on CNN last month after that school shooting. You look a lot like a favorite cousin I lost touch with when we were kids. Are you Michael Schmidt's kid? You look a lot like him. If you are, call me? We miss him and want to know what happened."

There was a number at the bottom of the page.

SRO Michael Schmidt leaned back in his groaning office chair, wordlessly crumpling the letter before tossing it at the waste basket and missing, staring blindly up at the ceiling of his office.

 **Zelda and the BIG Cheese**

New flesh body _sweating,_ ewwwwwww, Puck was more than ready to get out of the mascot costume. One last round through the party room, she promised herself, then I'll change and talk a blueberry burger out Bob and Linda who run the kitchen in the back.

She was surprised that she enjoyed this job so much. When Puck, she was a total wallflower. When Chuck E., she was the life of the party. Instead of kids fleeing and adults scowling like at _Freddy's_ when she'd possessed a simple plastic robot cat that did handstands while singing cheesy songs about pizza in a scratchy voice, she was the thing kids ran to and grown-ups tolerated.

Because here, she wasn't some robot with an unlocatable stink, she was a star. She was needed.

Thumping along in her company fursuit, Puck nearly walked past the gamer kid in the baggy green shirt and Triforce necklace aggressively mashing the buttons on a vintage Zelda video game console in an amazing show of speed and precision.

Okay, so he obviously didn't have a life and could spend all his free time mastering an obsolete video game.

Sayyyyy heyyyyy… there's something skeevy goin' on 'round here… Puck quickly trotted into the back to pull her street clothes on so she could investigate this kid and the red flags he was raising. Minutes later, she came out of the employee locker room in a clean tank top and sweatpants, Chuck E. left ready for tomorrow night's performance on his special airing rack.

Frowning suspiciously like the cop her Uncle Mike was, Puck made her way through the maze of vintage games towards the boy.

Yeah, something was definitely off about the strangely familiar boy, who looked to be about thirteen and ground through game levels as if playing a dull game of _Equestranuts, Grand Racing Day_. She'd seen full grown men play this game and fail on the first two game pass swipes. Narrowing her eyes, Puck suddenly realized that this kid looked just like the cartoon warrior decorating the side of the game, and it wasn't just the clothes!

"Link? OMG!" she said incredulously.

"Link's" game flashed "Game Over", asking him to enter his name in the number one slot on the leaderboard. He turned around, fixing her with eyes that were wrong.

Even more wrong, he hovered a few inches off the ground.

"No, BEN!" He held out a semi-translucent hand. Puck took it. It felt cold and not exactly there as she glanced past him at the arcade game screen. In all caps, 'BEN' followed by a lowercase 'd' was flashing on the screen next to a dancing Link and Zelda.

"Puck."

His eyes were all wrong - as if caught in a permanent camera flash: red pupils and cold blue-green eyes.

Flicker.

No, wait - his eyes were completely red and black?

Flicker.

…and then back to their original colors?

Like a glitch on a screen!

And he _really_ did look like Link- all the way down to his gold colored Triforce pendant and green slouchy hat.

Cool.

 **Jeff, himself, once again.**

Feeling a lot more clear-headed as well as a lot more homicidal, Jeff decided to introduce himself to the tall blonde.

Jeff was very good at introductions.

Because he said so.


	25. Just another day in Paradise

_Halloween week, Tuesday, Salem, Oregon, 201-_

 **Stupid Girls**

"Heyyyyyyyy Puuuuuuuuckkkkkkk. You'll never believe what happened last Saturday night."

Puck turned around halfway through putting her coat in her locker.

"Guess! You'll never guess!" Becca and her two harpy friends, Markus Barleycorn and Mindy Scaramucci stood behind her, almost but not quite controlling their giggles.

"What?" Puck asked warily. Until she'd gone total flesh, the "sisters" had left her alone. But lately, since she'd started dressing less like a skater and more like an athlete, they'd… brought up certain non-issues as if they were issues.

"Your uncle delivered pizzas to my house party."

"So?" Puck was aware that her Uncle Mike delivered pizzas for Dominos on weekends when he wasn't picking up unskilled labor jobs from Wolf and Sons Contracting. "Were they cold?"

"Everybody _knows_ what cops are like, _Do-MIIIIIIII-noooooo's."_ Markus, a tall, skinny kid who wore eyeliner, Burberry penny loafers and Dior Homme polo shirts and whose father was D-State Representative John Barleycorn, made like Ariana Grande, sneering, "Bet he drinks all his paychecks. Bet it's how he pays your rent to the Steins, _Dom-iiiiiiiii-nooooo's"_

"Markus! I-I can't believe you SAID that!" Mindy, plump Mindy who had a sweet face and held to the back of the bitch pack exclaimed in horror, "Don't be so mea—"

"Shut UP, _bacon butt!"_ Markus and Becca lashed out at the same time. They stared at each other and burst out laughing, "Jinx padlock!" Mindy blushed, her round, dark Italianate face going darker as she looked hard at the floor between her pink Uggs as if trying not to cry.

"When's the last time you had a bath, _Domino's?_ Bet it's hard to take a bath when there's an ENGINE BLOCK in your bathtub!" Markus smiled, glancing about as if acknowledging an audience applauding his cleverness and his painted-on 3sixteen jeans.

Mindy blushed harder, whispering, "Your uncle painted our lake cabin last August. He did a-a really good job. And your aunt who helped him was really, really nice to me."

"Don't be so stupid, Markie! Why bother with a bathtub or even toilet paper when Pussy here clearly can lick her own pussy?" Becca giggled at her own cleverness.

 _"That's it!_ You and me—" Puck slammed her locker shut and advanced on the "sisters". "Right _here!_ Right _now!"_

"Oooooooh, save me Markus. Domino's gonna hit me!" Going duck lips, Becca fanned her face, rolling her eyes. Still, was that a flash of alarm?

"This your fight, Puck?" jerk, twitch, STAMP. Toby suddenly was right behind Puck, leaning against her locker. How the hell did he do that? "Or can anybody join in the fun?" He cracked his leather gloved knuckles innocently, "Been a while since this floor was mopped."

Markus stepped back, manicured hands unconsciously raised in front of him. D-State Rep Barleycorn's button-down little #1 campaign asset sussed out what Toby was in the preference department the day Toby showed up, and considered grubby, half-shaven, scabby little Toby with his un-styled curls who dressed like he'd been brutally attacked by a Goodwill donation box and reeked of Old Spice and dirty socks, an embarrassment to the entire LGBT cause.

That and for some reason, twitchy, ticci Toby with his cold sores, raw cuticles and scuffed work boots, scared the living crap out of Markus.

Becca, not as fast on the uptake as she thought she was, sashayed forward, trilling innocently: "We have an old toilet left over from mom having our fifth bathroom redecorated. Does your big fat Aunt need another lawn planter?"

"OMG, Becca! How could you say that?" Mindy squealed in horror, stepping back quickly as both Puck and Toby launched themselves at Becca and Markus.

Only to be stopped by a large hand, "Is there a problem here?"

 **Solve for "X"**

Tedator Sargent looked down at the scratch paper in front of him, and then the drift of crumpled scratch paper and mandible-gnawed broken pencils that surrounded him.

He had done it.

He had solved for "x".

And "x" was good.

He went looking for his twin brother, Fredator.

Such an accomplishment as this deserved to be commemorated by a loudly triumphant war dance with one's closest blood kin.

One down, nineteen to go.

 **There are no small parts. Only small actors.**

It wasn't fair.

It just wasn't fair.

Maggie DESERVED to be Juliet.

Not that, that, _that overdressed LAWN GNOME that called itself Gilda!_

She had the part down!

But Gilda got the part, and Maggie was only an assistant wardrobe manager to Clawdeen.

It WASN'T FAIR! It WASN'T RIGHT! She had _TALENT!_

Maggie was just going to have to report that sour-faced bitch Ms. Morgandorffer to the Principal for discrimination.

Maggie would get what she deserved.

In spades!

 **Shalom, somewhat?**

Shaking her head while stifling a laugh, Rebbe Rachel Verbermacher politely ended the call from Father Tom with a broad grin.

If he thought a ghost showing up at Queen of Peace was something, just wait until she told him all about the family of fine porcelain golems and their possessions from Dresden, Germany that landed on her desk at Temple Beth Sholom in a large professionally packed box covered with international customs stickers a month ago!

Did _his_ family of ghosts have all their finances as well as their immigration papers in order?

Did they all have jobs waiting for them?

Did they have the paperwork for local schools, professional organizations and clubs already filled out along with the right amount for each membership if applicable?

Did they have intelligent, well-thought-out arguments prepared as to why they should be allowed to fully participate in all local religious and secular activities despite being not-exactly-human?

Rebbe Verbermacher, quietly partaking in her usual morning snack of rugalach and tea, apple and Lady Grey, seriously doubted it.

 **PTSD**

"What does it feel like to kill the innocent?"

Staring straight ahead, SRO Schmidt started to cross the greenspace between the gymnasium and the cafeteria to start his second job as assistant boxing coach.

Ms. Goode's unwelcome question floated around his mind, echoing and bumping off of half-remembered memories, as it had for quite some time.

One hand rose, unconciously pawing at the red band around the base of his throat, the one that the Steins hadn't been able to remove without shorting everything out.

All of them had one, Puck, Maggie, Jeremy Fitzgerald, and most regrettably of all, Raina.

Raina who had voluntarily joined them in their exile.

"What does it feel like to kill the innocent?"

Mike'd had one jolt too many – Charlie the original owner of the bodies they possessed, liked pushing the big red button just so she could enjoy watching them, him, writhe helplessly on the black and white tiles, even when they obeyed— big chunks of his long-term memory were gaping holes, no thanks to those indiscriminate electrons.

He could tell Jeremy and the girls had a hard time remembering what it had been like at _Circus_ Baby's – and what they'd done.

Of what _he'd_ done.

Of being homeless, out of cash and out of control. Of accepting a sketchy job he'd found in the paper, of getting kicked out of the Marines for a back injury that wasn't his fault.

Of wanting to die because what was the point?

Of not having the guts to go through with it.

Of dying anyway.

Of rising.

Of taking his anger, his grief, out on the living.

The living who'd been no better off than him.

Oh yeah, lady, what does it feel like to kill the innocent?

You really want to know? Do you? Really?

Mike's new body froze, mid step, eyes fixed and glassy for a few seconds, head swiveling back and forth, lower jaw flapping mindlessly, hands moving mechanically up and down.

Sit down, lady. I'd be happy to tell you, if I'd let myself remember.

The bell rang.

Mike snapped out of it, and as if the glitch had never happened, continued walking towards the gymnasium, thoughts jangling like the bell.

 **Blue Bunny**

"Victor and I are so, so sorry." Mrs. Stein looked distressed, "But this was all the DNA we were able to extract from that old hand puppet you gave us as a guideline to our engineering. We didn't realize you wanted a little girl."

"No, no." said Raina as she stared down at the freshly decanted synthetic body of what was clearly a seven-year old BOY who lay on his side in a fetal curl on the marble slab in Victor Stein's home lab, "It's… it's… it's all right. I'm just startled, is all." She reached towards the body and hesitated, "Mike once showed me his only baby picture; it's uncanny! May I, may I touch him?"

"Of course!" Vivica couldn't help but be proud of what her family had done for Raina, the blue bunny ears and matching powder puff tail that her daughter Frankie had engineered was icing on the cake. "Do you want to plug him in for his first charge?"

"Uh, you really think I should?" Raina looked nervously down at the twin leads Vivica placed in her hands and then at the discreet ports on either side of the little boy's neck, "I might mess it up!"

"Oh, it's almost impossible to get wrong. I mean, I dropped Frankie's the first time I plugged her in two years ago!" Vivica giggled, "And she's fine!"

" _Right."_

"Anyway, you'll or someone else in the family will have to help him the first few times, so you might as well get over it now." Vivica took Raina's pale hands in her two mint green ones, "Ooooooh, will you look at those pretty blue ringlets? Those eyelashes? Precious! Now, if you really want little Bon-Bon here, we can finish programming him in time for Christmas. Otherwise, we'll just put this little cutie in back in the nutrient bath and activate him next summer for ourselves after some modifications - Victor wants a son, can you believe it?"

Raina silently nodded assent and with Vivica's guidance, plugged Bon-Bon in.

 **The Woodwright's Apprentice**

Patador Sargent stepped back to admire the huge, wooden table he'd just finished making using only a broadaxe and a few simple hand tools that he'd had to build himself because _ooman_ tools were too small – blacksmithing was fun!

The huge black cottonwood log had been easy to work with once he'd dragged it out of the Williamette River.

Dragging it home down the middle of the inner-city highway after work a few feet at a time in a torrential downpour with the help of Fredator and Tedator using smaller logs as rollers using _ooman- style_ teamwork, while traffic sped around them, not so much.

But they'd triumphed.

And the local police who'd responded to the call that three crazy RADS were dragging a stolen tree down the middle of the Interstate, had been very understanding once Pat explained through M'Binte what he was up to and who his mate was.

They'd even formed a flashing blue and red honor guard around the three _Yautja_ until they got their trophy home – along with the recommendation that next time Pat needed to rent a big truck if he ever needed to move something this large using public byways again.

Digging the sawpit by himself after work out behind the abandoned factory they called home, had taken a while, but it had killed time until the huge two-man ripping saw he needed to cut slabs by hand from the big log had arrived via UPS through .

He'd put his two progenies to work when they came home to do laundry.

After pouring tung oil on the freshly sanded surface, Patador picked up Ruby and then Marlys and placed the two pups on the broad wooden expanse, bundles of clean rags already tied to their feet. He switched on _Swan Lake,_ gesturing at them to start "skating", mentally mapping out a set of matching chairs.

He would need six to start with.

But a trophy as big, as grand as this feasting table, deserved at least _twelve._

He would have to see what the Woodwright, who had been right about doing your own blacksmithing, had to say about chairs.

 **Medicine**

The world was becoming ever clearer for Jeff.

He didn't mind.

What he wanted, no what he needed, required a clear head.

It had been a while since he'd had a girlfriend.

It wasn't that he wasn't grateful for Sanctuary, the old Girl Scout camp.

Sanctuary kept him safe and clean when his head was louder than usual.

Sanctuary kept him in Froot Loops.

Sanctuary medicated him, giving him a break from the noise in his head when it got in the way.

When he bothered to take it.

Creature of nightmare that Jeff was, he was about to prepare a lovely one for his prey.

Only the best for his girl.

But first, he needed to talk to a fool.

 **Charlie**

Charlie sat in her borrowed car in front of where _Circus Baby's Pizza World_ had been replaced by a tanning booth supply house. _Freddy's_ was an adult night club, XXX.

Her sentence was up.

She was free.

Too bad she was broke.

Flat broke, as "in the darkness below zero".

Every last fuckin' dime had gone to cover Chapter 1.

What her creditors didn't get, the IRS did.

She'd done a bit of digging.

If her hunch from a few months back was right, there was money to be had.

Big money.

Or at least the satisfaction of revenge.

Time to drive to Salem.

 **Vacation**

With a reptilian smile, the tall man with dark hair waited for the privately chartered helicopter to land in the deer meadow overlooked by the rented luxury cabin in the Cascades.

His master, his employer, his _prey_ , had done exactly as predicted when allowed to stew in his own juices alone.

He pulled himself together and came looking for the man with dark hair.

It had taken him longer than usual, true.

But it had worked.

In the mean-time, the tall man had enjoyed a lovely end of season vacation, watching stories unfold in the shadows of mountains like so many wildflowers.

The helicopter's rotors stilled

The shadowy master of a global business empire limped towards him through the damp late autumn meadow, dark hair drifting in the mountain wind, thin sunlight glinting from his eye patch.

"I see that you have located my property." Was all he said.


	26. Party

_Halloween week, Merston High, Wednesday, 2 a.m., October 201-_

 **Downtime Dream I**

 _The greasy checkered tile of Freddy's feeling wrong beneath her feet, Puck found herself locked in the dance of cat and mouse. As before, she wasn't the cat and this wasn't Uncle Mike's generally chaotic but reassuringly friendly Maze._

 _The creepy hobo she'd seen hanging around school stood within touching distance, licking blood from the dripping knife in his hands from a mouth that grinned raggedly at her in the gloom, eyes like burned out Christmas lights. Turning to run, she screamed, gagging as something small and cold hit her face, clinging as it stuffed something into her mouth. Struggling, she violently clawed it loose so that it fell with a wet thump to the greasy checkerboard tiles with a quiet, squidgy, "hop, hop."_

 _Stumbling while clawing at her mouth, Puck careened through the tangle that Freddy's always became at night, the crunch of children's bones underfoot, but there he was, close enough for her to hear his wet breathing no matter which way she turned._

 _"Thirty years since all that happened, thirty years it took for us to rise.*" He crooned, a song she'd once heard in her head._

 _Puck skidded to a halt, spinning to the left. He was there, knife in one hand, the other extended as he dictated Puck's dance_

 _"Blood on the floor and in their eyes, we took the bite and left them to die. Thirty years and now I'm here," He added suggestively, a blood-red ribbon slithering down his arm from under his white sleeve and up hers, allowing him to reel her close enough that she could feel his blood-drenched breath on her face_

 _"No!" She gurgled around the gag, struggling to push him away, remembering Vinnie and Maggie as Foxy the Pirate and the Mangle dancing a Mexican courtship dance that used a red ribbon to the tune of "La Bamba"._

 _Long loose black hair billowing around him, the hobo shook his head in a glint of long, yellow teeth, waggling the bloody knife at her, lips petulant despite their mutilation, "Ah ah ah! You're the only one left to scream in fear. Your will means nothing when I've got you running away with blood in your tears!"_

 _And then the ribbon between them…_

 _…snapped._

 _Puck stumbled backwards, cheap gold party tinsel curtains hitting her bare arms unheeded like a thousand red-hot whips as he bore down on her, head cocked, giggling, reaching for her with stinking, bloody hands, lidless eyes glaring into hers, singing, "Take a look at me, Am I pretty enough for you? Will you want me? Will you beg for me?"_

 _Nauseated by his fetid breath, Puck spat out the gag, his face now inches from hers, what was left of his nose a dark, bubbling pit. Thinking he might let her go if she pretended to like it, Puck surrendered as he spun her around, lowering her into a dip in the heat of the spotlight just like in one of those sappy Disney Princess movies Maggie adored as the ribbon rose cobra-like from the greasy floor, wrapping itself about them so that they were nose to pit_

 _"Take a look at me, can you see the death in my eyes? All the time you're waiting, I get stronger with power and force…" the hobo was taller than her, his arms steel bands as he yanked the ribbon, sending her spinning away from him like a top, to fall to her knees, golden feathers twirling chaotically around her as the hobo dragged Puck to her feet by her wrists._

 _"It's not as if they're giving you much here in this goddamn town!" he sang teasingly before dropping her heavily to the tiles._

 _Sobbing, Puck pushed herself up and stumbled away from the spotlight, only to trip over a torn pink teddy bear, landing hard on her knees._

 _"I'll hunt you down and you will see…" the hobo strode up behind her, easily yanking her to her feet by the hair, twisting her arms behind her, resting his mutilated face against hers, breath ragged and hot as he whispered, in her ear, "...you'll come with me"_

 _"Back off, asshole!" Pucks scream was dulled by the surrounding blackness of this alien Maze. "I'm warning you!"  
_

 _But the hobo wasn't listening, gleefully warbling, "When you hit Night Five, that's life for you!" Spinning her so that he leered in her face with his flayed jaw, abruptly releasing her, adding. "At Freddy's, this horror ride built just for me, your doom is near, your time comes now, you're just too late, I'm coming for you now!"_

 _Puck struggled free, catching herself on the edge of the counter where there had once been a display of plushies, now replaced by severed heads as the hobo ran at Puck, knife raised waist high._

 _She sidestepped him at the last second, and scuttled behind the old speaker system, hoping she could stall long enough for something, anything to happen._

 _"All these toys, yet not much time before I take your soul tonight. Piece by piece I've built your fears, what can I use to end this right?"_

 _The hobo stood in the spotlight that followed him, head cocked, crooked yellow teeth glinting through his cheeks, "You're so called friends keep you from your doom, because nothing stops me from the past that's rotting."_

 _Puck reached behind her, fingers sinking into the mushy carrion of one of the severed heads on the countertop – from the corner of her eye she realized that it was Uncle Mike's as she suddenly flung it by the gaping mouth at the hobo so that it messily splatted against the chest of his immaculate white hoodie._

 _Startled, he dropped the knife. Puck vaulted over the countertop, landing in a tangle of bodies that farted and squelched disgustingly beneath her in a cloud of buzzing flies._

 _Gagging, she fell back on top of the noisome mound… the stench making her retch as she tried to crawl away into the shadows, only to see dirty red Converse round the counter. The world went sideways as the hobo snatched her up by the kitty collar, forcing her to her feet. "I'M STILL HERE, B*TCH! Your fight ends soon!" the hobo slid the tip of large knife under her chin, forcing her to meet his bulging eyes. Why was she so helpless? She always fought back before!_

 _"Please, stop!" she screamed._

 _"Thirty years ago, they used to be just toys. Just. Playmates." He jeered, adding conversationally, "But then it happened - the fire in their eyes became unstoppable, indestructible. They were machines ready for their final act. But thirty years have passed, and patrons renewed the franchise, rebuilt the nightmares," He paused, tittering. "Poor fools. What the fuck have they done?"_

 _She wrestled herself free. She ran, for real this time._

 _"I'M COMING FOR YOU!" He lunged and caught her, continuing the dance of predator and prey._

 _"12AM, they sit and stare, 1AM, I start the fair, 2AM, I zip and zoom, 3AM, I'm coming for you! 4AM, shit just got real, 5AM, you know the deal! Let's hope they make the last hour count!" He barked a short laugh, adding. "It's time to die" He lowered his mouth to hers._

 _But I'm already dead!_

 _Before Puck could wriggle out of his grasp, the ribbons were back, tangling around the two of them, pulling her against him, his gaping maw closing down on hers..._

 _"Thought I could trust my little baby doll not to run from me." Abruptly, the monster threw his head back, laughing. Snapping the ribbons, only to once again stumble over the torn pink teddy bear, Puck landed flat on her back in a drift of faded confetti and stale pizza bones, taking her attacker with her so that he landed heavily on top of her, bloody hands on either side of her face. Grinning his Glasgow grin, he leaned in for a kiss._

 _Shit shit shit! Was this really going to happen?_

 _"What are you going to do to me?!" Puck spat into his face._

 _"'Gone'do the best I can…." His breath was hot on her face and smelled of carrion as what was left of his lips touched hers, maggots spilling out of his mouth and onto her face. "Baby Doll!"_

Puck screamed, sitting up in the pale light of early morning in Salem, Oregon.

 **Afterglow**

Somewhere in the brush, Jeff the Serial Killer stood grinning, lighting a cigarette before pressing his hands tightly to either side of his face, sealing the loose flaps of his cheeks so that he could take a long, satisfactory drag, smoke leaking out of the raw hole in the middle of his face where his nose had once been.

Followed by smoke rings.

It had been a while since he'd gone on a date.

 _*FIVE NIGHTS AT FREDDY'S 3 SONG (It's Time To Die)_ \- DAGames. It seems that our Jeff, though passionate, isn't all that original when it comes to love songs.


	27. Hump Day

_Halloween week, Merston High, Wednesday, October 201-_

 **Drama Llamas, still in pajamas.**

"Miiiiiiiiiiiiiiike! Raaaaaaaaaiiiiinaaaaaa!"

"Here we go again, drama drama drama!" Maggie grumbled as she scrambled out of the bathtub, pulling her pink bathrobe on.

Sleeping in the basement and waking up early to take a long, luxurious bath every morning was waaaaaayyyyy better than sharing a room with the Loser Queen and her weird night terrors.

Terrors which had flared up all of a sudden after a long absence.

Usually fluffy tail soggy, Maggie yanked open the door to the small bedroom she once shared with her twin. Uncle Mike and Aunt Raina were on the floor holding a limp, sobbing Puck between them. That, and the little golden feathers. God, it looked like some exotic bird had been attacked by a stray cat, leaving feathers everywhere.

Worse, they were fussing over somebody other than Maggie.

Oh, spare me!

About to walk off to finish her cupcake-scented Bath and Bodyworks fantasy, Maggie heard Puck sob hysterically about ribbons.

Red ribbons.

OMG, _not_ another rerun of what happened last period just before the final bell rang for the day.

Da-ra-maaaaaaaa! Puck opened her locker to find a tasteless, but obviously heartfelt gift from one of the Wolf Brothers who was desperate enough to ask Puck to be his date for the StuCo's lame Harvest Dance on Halloween night. Maggie's twin took one look at the intricate cobweb of red satin ribbons cradling an old Bendy plushie and fuh- _reeeeeeeked!_

The blood-colored ribbons obviously came from Clawdeen's scrap bag, and the shabby little Bendy plushie looked like something swiped from a day care center after the babies barfed all over it.

It was tacky, _tacky AF!_

But that wasn't the worst part.

The worst part was the crying.

OMG, you would have thought that Puck was a toddler who had a piece of used Laffy-Taffy taken away after she'd pulled it from the trash at the mall and tried to eat it. Oh, you think that this part was humiliating enough? More embarrassing headaches had come in the form of Tina and Gilda. Followed by MELODY! MELODY for God's sake, MELODY!

Tina had scooped up the crying wah-baby of her sister and started rocking her, plonk, right in the middle of the hall where everybody could see. That German bitch Gilda who got the part of Juliet that belonged to Maggie brought over a water bottle and a lace hankie – unbelievable as Melody started cooing and singing to Puck.

What the hell? Maggie was the injured party here – she was the one cheated out of the part of Juliet! Where was her babying?

Toby, the weird, gross twitchy kid had stared for a long time into Puck's locker, which looked as if a Muppet had been disemboweled, spraying cheap and tacky ribbon blood everywhere, before telling everybody to touch nothing as he slammed the locker shut and ran and got Uncle Mike.

OMGeeeeeeee, Uncle Mike had been THE WORST, thanking Toby and making like a real cop by making sure nobody touched anything, taking pictures, and had they seen anybody who shouldn't be getting into her twin's locker in the last hour or so?

He had released them all an hour later – borrrrring – and all over a tacky gift and gooshy unsigned love note obviously written by a spaz.

Why, oh why did Uncle Mike have to be the school SRO?

Anyway, today was the day that bitch Ms. Morgandorffer got what was coming to her. Maggie switched on her blow dryer, six sets of hot rollers already heating for her tail. Assistant wardrobe manager? As if!

 **Stupid Girls I**

Yesterday, after a picnic lunch of Froot Loops dry right out of the box out atop the dumpster behind the school cafeteria, Jeff found the idiot he was looking for: Becca.

It had been easy.

Too easy.

Surrounding his handsome self in nightmare yesterday so that Becca saw what she wanted to see as she'd slipped out to cop a smoke, he'd handed her his gift, all red ribbons and spite while telling her how to open the locker, how to place the gift.

Smelling the scent of dirty feet wafting up from Jeff's gift, Becca eagerly complied, not noticing Jeff's lack of a nose, his missing eyelids, his unnatural smile… and the stench of old death that surrounded him like an unseen dark cloud.

Becca, Becca, silly moo in your expensive sheltered life; can't you see what's going on six inches past your nose?

Obviously not, because you took something from somebody you shouldn't have, to get back at somebody who could care less that you exist.

Which pisses you off in your little pink designer womb more than anything.

Because _you_ are _important_.

Because _you matter._

Because _you_ are the only important thing in _your universe._

And anybody who doesn't recognize this is a _threat_.

Because maybe, just maybe, it might force you to recognize that in the grand scheme of things, you are no better than the ones you demand worship from.

And we can't be having that, now, can we?

Jeff thought Becca was the funniest thing he'd witnessed since Dakota the Dummy's cousin tripped over his own intestines and faceplanted on the sidewalk in front of Merston High.

Maybe a bouquet was in order.

There was a lovely patch of poison ivy behind the school.

The frost had turned it a wonderful shade of blood red.

Perfect.

 **Queen B**

Really, it had been simple.

On Monday, Cleo deNile watched with distaste as repulsive little Toby Rogers, someone she wouldn't have deigned to use as a footstool back in the day, jerkily printed his name in the write-in portion of the Harvest Dance royalty ballot for Harvest King with a leaky pen he'd picked out of a nearby trash can.

Initially outraged, it was Deuce Gorgon, her long-time boyfriend's job to be King to her Queen, Cleo then smiled, heavily kohled eyes half-lidded, gaydar twitching with glee.

Markus Barleycorn, whose dad was a mere Oregon state Representative to her father's once having been the greatest Pharaoh of Egypt with life and death power over millions, had been a pain in her perfect posterior since kindergarten.

Enter Toby. Not only was twitchy, acne-scarred Toby openly gay, Toby was a RAD...

Add to that the fact that Toby spent most of his days in the Special Education room...

To object would make Markie-poo look like a traitor, a bigot, AND a racist: three for the price of one.

Oh dearie dear, you can't have THAT, now, can you?

Nooooo, not when daddy's up for re-election next month, right? Not when Daddy's always relied upon an extremely liberal constituency to keep him in office, right?

Ooooh la LA, _get rekt!_

With a giggly smirk, Cleo got out her gold fountain pen with the scarabs engraved around the barrel from her custom Kate Spade handbag, and ticked off little Markie-Warkie Wanna-Bee as queen and then wrote Toby in as king in a flourish of blue lotus-scented ink.

Cleo then coyly flashed what she'd done to the rest of her friends before daintily folding the ballot and dropping it into the big ballot pumpkin to the jingle of gold bangles she'd designed herself.

Though Royal all the way down to her gilded turquoise toenails, Cleo deNile had to admit that democracy occasionally had its uses.

 **1(2x) = 30 or, "Math for Jocks"**

Merston High's main math teacher, Walter Stein, looked up from grading the previous day's Algebra I tests just in time to have Tedator Sargent drop a huge stack of paper topped by a "Basic Mathematics" (ie., "Math for Jocks") textbook on his desk with a heavy "thud" and an expectant look in his tiny yellow eyes.

Walter cautiously pulled a sheet of paper from the stack and examined it, acutely aware of the huge RAD towering over him in sagged jeans, huge athletic shoes that lit up with every step, and a loose Seattle Seahawks jersey, his massive head impressively dripping with dreadlocks.

It appeared to be homework.

A lot of homework.

Tedator's homework, to be exact.

Mr. Stein knew it was Tedator's because each page had Tedator's name printed on it in neat block letters.

Along with the time and the date executed.

Seeing as since the first day of class, Tedator had sprawled in the back of the classroom, head back, mandibles moving in time to the music of what Mr. Stein presumed was a low, guttural, snarl of a snore that he soon learned to ignore – Stein was shocked that Tedator could even spell his name, much the less… do an entire academic year's… worth of basic math… designed to keep Merston High's Varsity-level athletes… in compliance with Oregon State academic requirements… without actually flunking them.

…in less than a single week, judging by the dates… which were in chronological order.

Stein selected papers at random, checking them against the Teacher's Edition he kept locked in the top drawer of his desk.

They were all correct.

And written down in tiny, precise, square block letters and numbers.

He looked up, acutely aware of the towering bulk of the student looming over him.

Tedator Sargent.

Tedator Sargent, who n _ever_ turned in his assignments and slept through class.

Tedator's mandibles extended and flexed before folding back, exposing a tiny mouth lined with needle sharp teeth. The mouth opened and closed a few seconds, as if thoughtfully chewing on something.

Stein, who had watched Tedator and his twin brother eat lunch more than once, found himself wondering if he should flee, steeled himself for whatever was about to happen.

Finally, the mouth relaxed, and a voice right out of Public Broadcasting came out of it, saying, "More, please."

 **Stupid Girls II**

Markus Barleycorn stared at the announcement tacked to the bulletin board beside the main High School office in disbelief.

Oh, she was Fall Harvest Dance Royalty all right, but the king, the king she wanted, the king she _needed_ , wasn't listed beside hers.

It wasn't Chad, gorgeous, hunky Chad, Varsity quarterback and power lifter with his loose, blonde surfer hair, chiseled features, steel blue eyes, and abs to DIE for, who'd stood dociley holding hands with Markus on the platform during her father's latest upcoming re-election speech wearing the LGBT pride t-shirts that Markus designed for the occasion, XXXL.

Oh, God, the horror.

The horror.

Toby, grotty, scabby little Toby with his matted, dirty curls, B.O., and potty-mouth, who picked his scabs in public, was the King of the Fall Harvest Dance to Markus's Queen by fair election.

The people had spoken.

How could this be?

How could everyone betray Markus like this after all she'd done for them?

It wasn't faaaaaaaairrrrrrrr!

Ohhhhhhh, daddy would hear about this all right.

Daddy would fix… everything.

He always did.

 **Karma**

Cleo deNile's selfless act caused a minor rebellion, a domino effect as it were.

Her friends stepped in line right behind her.

They didn't like Markus, either. Since kindergarten, she'd start stuff, and when the teacher or other adult in charge showed up, she always managed to push the blame onto the victim.

When that didn't work, daddy Barleycorn took care of it.

So that the victim was to blame.

It was amazing how many bullies there were in the district, K-12.

Scotty McCorkle, all three hundred and fifty painfully shy sweaty pounds of him, noticed what the Skeleton Crew had done. Remembering being called "Wide-Load" and worse in front of his hopeless crush Ghoulia Yelps by Markus and her bitch pack at the Country Club swimming pool last summer, Scotty happily wrote in Toby Rogers for King of the Harvest Dance.

Christopher Rice, the deputy Sheriff's son, who once wet his pants in third grade because of a painful bladder infection still endured being called "PISSSSSS-topher" by Markus and his entourage to the point where last summer he seriously considered taking his father's service revolver and offing himself, thought Toby would make a wonderful King of the Harvest Dance.

Ghoulia Yelps slowly wrote in Toby's name. It took her fifteen minutes, but she felt the effort on Toby's behalf was worth it. Markus put gum in her hair in the fifth grade. It had taken a week for Ghoulia's mother to get it out. She didn't know Toby personally; it took her a while to get to know anybody for obvious reasons, but mush-mouthed slo-mo Ghoulia was sure he'd do a wonderful job.

Fastidious Tina Morph, a hopeless romantic who believed in Disney fairy tales with all her hearts and who more than once got called "Roach Motel" by Markus when she wasn't brandishing a can of Raid at Tina while threatening to sic Immigration on her and her family because they were obviously illegal aliens, wrote Toby in as well. Poor Cinder-Toby deserved a break. Tina was sure he'd clean up good.

She'd even supply the soap and the wire brush.

Lydia Dietz, whose acne qualified as a Biblical plague and called down Markus's scorn as a result, felt that Toby, repulsive as he was what with all that twitchy-twitchy picky-picky, would look good in the Harvest Crown.

And so on down the line of martyrs to special snowflakedom until it was Chad's turn.

Chad who'd grown up next door to Markus thought Markus's expensive gifts were okay, even if he didn't like Polo aftershave. Had Chad been into that sort of stuff? Duuuuuude! Markus was shrill and wore waaaaaayyyyyy too much makeup! So what if Markus let him drive her convertible? Anyway, Chad already had a date for the Harvest Dance: Abbie Bominable, the big blue Yeti girl with the thick Russian accent and the body of a muscular super-model wrapped in blue plush.

Impressed by how the big girl literally wiped out the opposing team single-handed, the thoroughly smitten Chad, staunching a violent nosebleed from where she'd trampled him in pursuit of the ball, asked Abbie to be his date during last week's Rugby match while Markus got a mani-pedi.

Blushing purple, Abbie cooed "yes" while clamping down on his nose with an ice pack to stop the bleeding with one big, blue clawed hand. Later Chad found himself singing DNCE's "Cake by the Ocean" in the shower while contemplating her firm, fresh cake and what he'd like to do to it.

Anyway, who gave a shit about what Markus said about RADS being unfit to hang out with _real_ humans? Fangs were hot, velvety blue fur was hotter, and a girl who could trample Chad mercilessly? Hawttttttttt!

It also didn't hurt that Abbie's dad was the biggest vendor of ice and ice machines in the Pacific Northwest and owned the ice concession for the Seahawks plus a few other pro teams in the region – _yeah baby!_

Chad's dad owned the biggest HVAC company in the state– Chad was primed to take on a junior partnership and a six-figure income after graduating trade school in another two years. Hubba hubba!

Lust mingled with acquisitiveness as he contemplated taking Russian language lessons, Chad carelessly tossed Markus Barleycorn into the social woodchipper before joining Abbie in practicing for the upcoming regional High School boxing tournament as heavyweights.

 **Stupid Girls III**

Hiding in a bathroom stall, Mindy finished off the third package of Twinkies before the first bell rang, licking her fingers in shame. The more Mindy ate, the fatter she got.

The fatter Mindy got, the more Mindy's two BFFs jeered at her.

The more they jeered, the more Mindy ate.

Why, WHY did they have to be so, so, MEAN?!

It hadn't been like this when the three of them were little and their mothers and stepmothers all played golf together.

It had been fun, they'd hung out together, they'd had sleepovers and skating parties, video games and makeovers, with Barbie and Ken all the way - long before Markus announced to the world that he identified as a she.

Mindy rose, stuffing the incriminating Twinkie wrapper deep inside the sanitary napkin disposal bin, ready to face the ordeal that was the day ahead of her in her Lane Bryant ensemble.

Suddenly, Mindy leaned against the locked door, pulled out a fourth package of Twinkies from her purse, and after tearing open the wrapper with her teeth, began mechanically stuffing each little golden cake with its burden of sugary comfort into her mouth, one after the other.

 **Troop 70290**

Sargent sat cross-legged on the floor of her bower, surrounded by papers from the local Girl Scout Council office, consulting M'Binte through the iPad about specific _ooman_ words.

She had taken the day off from Juvenile to prepare for the first meeting of Brownie Troop 70290 after the previous leader fled after only three meetings, pleading migraines and a pending ugly divorce.

None of the other mothers wanted the job. The troop would have to disband – Ruby and Marlys would be heartbroken.

Sargent stepped in.

It was her duty.

Maidens needed guidance.

Particularly in the matter of bucks.

Maidens needed to learn how to manage bucks, whose brains lived in their loincloths, without compromising themselves and endangering the clan's future.

Fast.

But was Oregon really ready for its first combat-ready Brownie troop?

As for spring cookie sales, Sargent had a few ideas of her own.

 **Charlie, once more.**

Charlie studied the array of shoplifted electronic parts and cheap tools scattered across her shabby motel bed on the outskirts of Salem, Oregon.

It had been a while since Charlie'd assembled one of these units, but she hadn't forgotten how.

Oh, no. Not at all.

She'd seen the edge of a band around Mike's neck in what little online coverage she'd found about the unsuccessful school shooting last month. Presumably, if they were even still active, the others were nearby.

If Charlie's luck held, they'd still be collared as well.

Fun.

Thanks to the bankruptcy auction before the feds busted her for cheating on her taxes, Mike, the others, no longer belonged to her, but she could still get her own back.

Even if it meant a fried out central nervous system on Mike's part followed by a small, extremely local electrical fire. And if his so-called family went down convulsing with him?

They owed her.

Particularly Mike Scmidt.

Who'd turned them all against her.

Charlie reached for a part, licking her lips.

It all started with a small, black box that fitted nicely in her hand…


	28. Tempest in a Toilet

_Halloween week, Merston High, Thursday, October 201-_

 **"I wish to make a complaint."**

In the middle of directing morning traffic out in front of Merston High, SRO Mike Schmidt turned around to confront one of Nature's unavoidable little pains in the ass: Markus Barleycorn.

No, wait, MARLENE Barleycorn.

Not Markus.

Last week State Representative John Barleycorn's little boy, already out, had decided that _he_ was really a _she_ and made sure everyone knew it.

Whatever.

Stifling a sigh while waving a freshly emptied bus through the intersection, Mike gestured to Marlene that he would be right with her, trying to remember which gender pronoun to use with this over-priviliged byproduct of the rich, powerful, and liberal elite.

Life had been so much easier back in the 1990s before Mike died. You were either one or the other, and sometimes you were gay.

Or bi.

Whatever.

But now? Now you could loudly declare that you identified as a rutabaga from Venus whose mother had been a parrot madly in love with a can of Spam and had fifteen unique genders depending on the phase of the moon.

And everyone would nod to each other in wise agreement, saying: "Of course you are a Venusian rutabaga who is the product of an inter-species relationship involving an unpopular tinned meat product and an even more unpopular root vegetable with fifteen moon-dependent genders – anybody can see that! If they don't? They're obviously haters and therefore to be loudly condemned because all right-minded individuals hate haters!"

Or something like that.

As far as Mike could recall, what with his increasingly faulty long-term memory, people like Marlene had their own little section of town where they could be whatever they wanted to be without bothering everyone else; though many hung around the docks whenever a carrier or other large Navy vessel came in the hopes of getting lucky.

Sometimes, they did.

As far as Mike was concerned, it was an arrangement that worked as long as everybody left everybody alone.

Nowadays, people like Marlene seemed to be EVERYWHERE– creating a social minefield that Officer Schmidt would just as soon NOT have to deal with – not twice in one day, anyway.

Mike was not getting paid enough to have abuse hurled at him by a purple-haired individual obscured by piercings, rainbows and tattoos sporting a tutu, combat boots, and a five o'clock shadow simply because during a pull-over in front of the school he'd accidentally used the wrong gender pronoun while writing out the citations, making him want to scream back, "Look man-lady-dude-xhe-xir-whoopitywhoopitywhoopity WHATEVER-THE-FUCK-YOU-ARE-FOR-THE-NEXT-FIFTEEN-MINUTES: I don't make the goddam laws, dumbass, I just get paid to enforce 'em! If y'all don't goddam like it, why were you speeding the wrong way down a goddam one-way street in a school zone blowing a goddam trumpet with your bare ass hanging out the sunroof while declaring your beautiful, unique self to be uniquely beautiful through a goddamned sound system so big you have to pull it behind y'all's goddamned hot pink Tesla on a goddamned trailer with faulty brake lights in a goddamned school zone? Now, here's y'all's goddam ticket - shove it up y'all's ass if you want to. Me? I don't care what you identify as – I'm just here to see that y'all don't kill people or whatever they're goddamned called these days while expressing your goddamned beautiful individuality!"

This kind of honesty gets you canned and publicly branded a bigot, making it difficult to get a new job to replace the one you just lost. So, Mike settled for the safer option of: "Have a nice day. Drive safely."

Orrrrrrrrr, ummmmmmm… something like that.

As for RADS, clearly identifiable RADS? Well, that was an entirely different kettle of easily offended vegan fish-shaped tofu patties. Most times all Mike had to do was lift whatever hat he was wearing and show them what was under it and they'd let it slide – he was one of them, they were safe with him.

Generally.

(Every group has its assholes.)

Speaking of assholes, whatever it was that was upsetting Marlene, would probably be something stupidly blown all out of proportion if the teacher's lounge rumor mill was true.

Which meant that daddy Barleycorn would get called.

And somebody would get fired.

Great.

Waving another bus through the intersection, Mike warily watched the fuming Marlene flounce up and down the sidewalk from the corner of his eye, her two best friends Becca and Mindy, standing near with folded arms.

Damn, last bus of the morning. Last night it had been him and Raina meeting with the district superintendent about Maggie lodging a discrimination complaint against Merston High's English and Drama teacher because she didn't get the part of Juliet in the upcoming school play. He'd stood and watched unseen at the back of the auditorium on audition day: Maggie sucked, the little Golem girl didn't.

So, he and Raina told the superintendent to drop it and had to listen to Mags stomp and whine all over the house about the unfairness of it all until she powered down for the night.

Today, it was Marlene getting her Spanx in a twist about something or other.

Great.

It was times like this Mike wished his new body would let him get drunk.

 **Who pissed in your Cheerios?**

"What the ACTUAL HELL sis?"

"But I DESERVE the lead – I'm a star… you're my twin, you should have supported me!" Maggie whined. Head still aching from last night's nightmare, Puck plonked her smaller sister down onto a seat at the outcast table, knowing that this was the most effective punishment for the ever-expanding brat aka: Mag-zilla.

"Y-you're T-TWINSs-s-s-s-s-?" Toby looked up from his usual sandwich of dried up Wonder Bread, all limp dill slices and curly at the edges bologna, monotone voice reflecting how Puck felt. "Y-you t-t-wo d-d-d-on't e-eeve-n-n-n l-look l-like…"

Disgusted, Puck interrupted Toby while side-eying Maggie, nodding, "Fraternal... thank God! Dr. Stein calls it "superfecundation" (look it up): different fathers, same mother - our mom was a big ol' slut-bunny!" She poked at Maggie, who squealed, "'Course I didn't back you up last night – twin or not, you _sucked_ – Gilda was good, she knew all the lines and didn't sound like a CD with a skip. So there ain't no use goin' all diva-diva like last night in the principal's office when our aunt and uncle said drop it!"

"Wait, so that's what was going on in the principal's office last night?" Tina trilled around a mouthful of rat satay and jasmine rice, "Dad was plunging one of the boy's room toilets after somebody tried to flush a pair of gym shorts. He thought somebody got into a fight with the vending machines until Mags here ran out the front door crying… wow, were your Aunt and Uncle upset!"

Maggie pouted, "It's that Morgandorffer dyke's fault, biyach! She didn't give me the part I deserve – she made me assistant wardrobe manager when everybody knows I'm a star!"

Tina Morph, who was Juliet's nurse and didn't mind, hastily swallowed her bite, one mouth grimacing after the other, "Ms. Morgandorffer is a very nice lady. She helps people with their homework even when it's not her class. I saw your audition, you were terri—"

"STFU!" Puck hissed, gesturing as Ms. Morgandorffer strolled past the outcast table on lunchroom duty, still very much employed. She shot a hooded glance at Maggie from behind her thick glasses. Blushing, Maggie scowled down at the table, piquant face red.

Trouble averted, Puck slapped her sketchbook down in front of Maggie, snarling, "Sketchbook. Now." before shoving a pencil in front of her. "Hope ya like Ticonderoga, 'cause I can't afford no better than pencils dropped in the parkin' lot thanks to you."

"And this is fair because?" Maggie held the chewed, orphan pencil up like it was a limp, piece of used spaghetti from the trash before slumping over, mumbling, "You get to keep the scooter and the iPhone, while I had to return nearly ALL my nice clothes, and Draculaura's dad changed his mind and took me off of the family phone plan - my Facebook followers miss me!"

"Facebook, my ass! You spent my money like everybody else's - you don't get _nothin'!_ Anyway, I buy all my shit used off'a Craigslistist so I can work while you wear all them big damn ugly shoes only once and then kick to the back of the closet! Anyway, I don't see why you still care about losin' your pretty clothes: all your damned two-faced rich friends won't even talk to you anymore after you tried to get Ms. Morgandorffer fired for discrimination yesterday so you now have to sit and power up with us losers in the outdoor dining area 'cause she's Clawdeen Wolf's favorite teacher!"

"This is soooo not fabulous." Maggie wailed, rolling her eyes towards the ceiling, ears and tail drooping.

"What about stealing your family's money is fabulous? Toby said, setting his unappetizing sandwich down. "My ol' man did it. Drank it all up an-an-an gambling w-w-w-what was left – we l-l-l-losssst our car an' g-got kicked out of our house an' had t' move here 'cause a him!" He added before abruptly spasming, heavy work boot hitting the floor _hard_ before bouncing up, knee violently striking the table from below with a loud "BANG!" so that everybody's lunch danced.

Remembering the near school-shooting in September, the entire lunch room went silent for a few seconds, eyes nervously sliding in the direction of the Outcast table. Even the Sargent brothers paused in their enthusiastic gorging, looking up, blood dripping from their mandibles, tiny yellow eyes interested.

Then, quickly as it happened, all eyes went back to the food in front of them and the chatter resumed.

"Good thing he can't feel pain!" Puck thought, blushing, catching her battery pack before it hit the floor, wanting just to sit somewhere alone reading a banned book while listening to Dan Reynolds sing about doing _Whatever it Takes_. She said out loud, "Mags, just STFU and draw!"

Sulkily, Maggie began doodling.

Poorly.

"When's the last time you drew something besides flies?"

"STFU." Maggie responded primly, turning her back to her twin.

Fine.

Puck started loudly singing _Light 'em Up_ , beating time with a plastic spoon just to annoy Maggie.

"Stahhhhhp!" Maggie snapped the pencil in half and tossed it to the floor.

"What? Can't take my edginess proving how dull and talentless you are?"

"Meanie!"

"Feel the thunder, BIYACH!" Puck cackled, "I work my ass off for you and cover for you all the damned time. An' what do I get?"

"O-M-GEEEEEEEEEEEEE, I can't DO this anymore!" Maggie wailed, slamming the sketchbook shut loudly enough for Ms. Bruntford to look up from her third ciggy over by the cafeteria dumpster in the back parking lot and glare at them, yelling something in a smoke-hoarsened voice that no one listened to.

Tipping over her chair with a crash, Maggie fled screeching with Puck not far behind in a cloud of shed fur, only her flight was more of a stumble than a run no thanks to her red platform Calvin Kleins. Skidding on the snapped pencil, Maggie bent, removing them before hurling them at Puck one after the other, the second bulky shoe actually connecting.

"Ow, HEY!" Puck chased the barefoot brat past the Popular table, into the hall, and then into the girl's restroom.

 **Puberty? No thanks!**

"Ummmmmm, t-t-t-time of the m-m-m-month?" Toby stuttered uncomfortably, abruptly standing. If this is what it would be like if Lazari and Sally ever hit puberty, he wanted no part of it - _no way, no how!_

Appetite lost, he tossed his half-eaten sandwich and soggy Fritos into the trash and went to put his battered Scooby Doo lunchbox in his locker.

Before he could do so, Toby found himself being dragged backwards by the jacket into a nearby empty classroom by a very small businessman.

 **Raising the Stakes**

"You know vy you are here." Tepes released Toby so that he staggered even as the much, much smaller man spun Toby around to face him.

It was Tepes.

"Why are you h-here?" Toby stammered, his terror of the man or whatever he was turning his knees to water.

"I feel the need to remind you of your mission, as well as give you…" Tepes looked disdainfully up at the clock hanging over the smartboard, adding in a light, precise voice, "...new orders."

"What?" Toby frowned, left eye twitching, sweat cascading between his shoulder blades where he could still feel the ghost of Tepe's grip.

"Do not keel Jeffery. Keep him in his place though. Keep protecting the girl."

"Why c-can't we ju-"

"You know vy your Master and I chose you for zis job."

Statement, not question.

"No, sir." (a whisper with averted eyes)

Tepes gripped Toby's shoulder, "You are better suited for zis, because you are _homosexual._ "

Despite having outed himself the first day here, the hairs on Toby's body stood up at this word. Tepes continued, distaste coloring his voice. "As such, you vill never become truly attached, and you are much more, shall I say, _subtle_ than Brian or his charming best vriend, Tim."

Toby's involuntary spasms increased, terrified brain misfiring harder than usual.

Tepes eyed Toby's involuntarily motions with naked disgust, "When known as "The Impaler" in Wallachia, I would have had you executed on principle whether you had a job or not – there are far, far worse things a man can be besides an idle drain upon zociety. Bezides, you pass, unlike most of your Master's stable of freaks. No-vun takes a twitching fool seriously. A twitching fool does, says, and goes vherever he likes unchallenged because he is a twitching fool, korrekt?" Tepes stared him down despite being the shorter of the two. Toby's head jerked, hard, involuntary obscenities popping out, causing him to break eye contact and look away.

Tepe's frowned, opened his mouth and then abruptly shut it as a loud screech that sounded like somebody tossed a cat into a woodchipper, followed by a loud, wet crash, came from across the hall.

"Do you vish to live? Do your job." Tepes released Toby and walked away with that gliding pace of his back out into the hallway.

Shaking, Toby stepped out of the classroom as a wave of stinking water and clots of wet toilet paper and... worse, washed past him out of the girl's bathroom before impudently lapping at the serene Tepe's heels.

Tepes turned, "I see your responsibility and her sister haff been playink house again. Inform the janitor to bring mop and bucket. Volf Brothers will take care uff the rest.

And then he was… gone.

 **Phone Tag**

Marlene looked down at her iPhone numbly. All the big dumb SRO officer could do was file a report.

So she'd tried a sure thing, daddy.

State Representative (D) John Barleycorn told her that Toby Rogers was a political goldmine: gay and a RAD, two for the price of one.

No, three. Toby was obviously underprivileged.

Pure. Gold.

Too bad he wasn't black, Latino, or some sort of indigenous or other: the gold would have been purer.

On the other hand, he had Tourette's and a whole string of learning disabilities - you worked with what you had and spun up what you didn't. Are you SURE, son, that he's not an illegal alien, or at the very least a Dreamer in danger of having his parents deported? No? What a shame, son, what a shame.

...

...

...sooooooo, if _Markus_ wanted the full chop this spring, with John Barleycorn footing the bill, _he'd_ better toe the line.

When Marlene objected, Barleycorn replied, "My dear _boy_ , my constituency, whose votes pay for your fake breasts and faker eyelashes, would rally around and protest upon behalf of any random dead raccoon shoveled bloated and stinking from the side of the nearest highway if it they were told it was homeless, illegal, had a substance abuse problem, had been molested as a child, was gay, and a downtrodden minority deprived of its land and original culture by whitey. Had you not been born gay, I would have seen to it that they saw you as gay for the sheer number of votes it has gained me since you were thirteen and came out to me on your birthday. Toby Rogers is your king. Act accordingly or become a real girl on someone else's dime."

And then he hung up.


	29. This political message brought to you

_Halloween week, somewhere in McMansionville, Salem, Oregon, Thursday evening, October 201-_

 **Deplorable**

Sipping from his Scotch and soda, State Representative John Barleycorn (D) studied the recently taken school picture of the raw-lipped, acne-scarred Toby Rogers with interested distaste.

Nasty looking little piece of white trash, one of Hillary's deplorables. If the kid WAS a RAD, it must be something inside – no fangs, no wings, no excess body hair.

Too bad.

Barleycorn gave a reflective sniff, something more obvious would have helped. The November midterm elections were approaching fast; his numbers were falling behind a more obviously RAD candidate, some sort of werewolf bitch who'd rocketed through the ranks of the local Democratic party like a greyhound on fire over the last two years.

Taking Barleycorn's usually reliable source of votes with her.

Which, as far as John Barleycorn, who had started his political career as a liberal Democrat, before see-sawing between parties as politically expedient, returning to full on liberal Democrat the second the orange goblin took over the Whitehouse – was unacceptable.

It also didn't help that she also identified as black.

Scion of a patrician East Coast family with most of its money coming from a national chain of hardware stores with connections to the DuPonts, the Rockefellers, and the Kennedys, Barleycorn initially found himself struggling in a political arena where minorities with a general grudge against middle-aged white men were rapidly gaining ground until he realized that the right combination of moral outrage, public empathy, and compassion got him where he wanted to be when he lost his wife to ovarian cancer during a run for public office.

As the tragedy of the transplanted Barleycorn losing his wife rapidly faded, he allied himself to the causes of others – so what if he could care less about LGBT, women's or indigenous rights just as long as publicly appearing to support the outrage of the tattooed tofurkey gobblers with their pink pussy hats and Wiccan woo-woo kept him in office?

Anyway, they had short memories, quickly forgetting he'd once openly been for various Iran/Iraq wars and big oil and against Immigration and for deporting Illegals the second he began crusading upon the behalf of all those poor, (read: USEFUL) Central American babies wipped fwom they mommies bweatst by da mean ol' Bowder Patwol Stowmtwoopers and put in dog kennels when this shit had been going on for decades uncontested?

Simply put: pinpoint the current discontent of any given group, court them, appear to agree with them, and _voila!_ you stay in office doing nothing while raking it in on your way to the Oval Office. Lately, most of his constituency were well-to-do over-educated crybabies who'd pay $1/each for an allegedly organic apple loaded down with white liberal guilt hijacking the issues of the less fortunate who should shut up and go play golf the way Nature intended them to because the poor and the downtrodden were always going to be poor and downtrodden.

Doing anything about it was a waste of everyone's time, including that of the poor and downtrodden.

Still, if not for them, he could always court unemployed white working stiffs, going from tofu, deeply spiritual designer tattoos, and organic non-GMO wine to cheap beer, morbid obesity, and mis-spelt jailhouse tats – promising to give the meth-cookers and the Spam eaters what they thought they wanted with no intention of EVER putting out.

As to the Barleycorn _daughters_ , along that line, couldn't at least ONE of them have had the decency to become a radical feminist environmentalist or at the very least a polyamorous indeterminate gendered-person participating in a pagan group marriage to support him?

No, the girls were hopelessly, deliberately mainstream and therefore, _useless._

Barleycorn's son, Markus Barleycorn III with his childish games of "gender pretendsies", on the other hand, was very, _very_ useful. What the boy currently spouted in his gratingly shrill voice was obviously wishful thinking, but if people would vote for a man openly supporting his whatever he-she-it thought he-she-it was any given week, well, Rep. Barleycorn would support-support-support as long as it got him what he wanted-wanted-wanted.

(Even if it meant dangling carrotlike the promise of a full Caitlin Jenner as a high school graduation gift in front of his offspring so long as he/she/it cooperated.)

(As to it actually happening, well, we'll see.)

Speaking of carrots: Toby Rogers was gold.

Gold was meant to be spent.

Having been blocked from political haymaking by Tepes over the almost-school mass shooting that the RAD SRO had abruptly cancelled by falling on the shooter and breaking every bone in the shooter's angry, entitled white-bread body, Barleycorn, taking his chances, had his press secretary contact the local media outlets and then the major national news brokers, letting them know about the same-sex, mixed species couple who were going to be Harvest King and Queen at Merston High's annual Harvest Dance. You'd be stupid not to fully cover such a groundbreaking event. And by the way, the Queen is Markus Barleycorn – yes, _that_ Barleycorn – spelled B.A.R.L.E.Y.C.O.R.N., with a "c", not a "k".

Why bother making this shit up when it happens on its own?


	30. Reville of Sorts

_Halloween week, Salem, Oregon, Friday Morning at sunrise, October 201-_

 **Dream Interval II: Broken Mirrors**

 _Toby's heels hit the tile of the dark hallway surrounding him, its checkered length endless._

 _The groans._

 _Not again._

 _Something underfoot giggled shifting in the darkness._

 _Toby felt his gut clench, and he just wanted to curl up and die._

 _He knew this dance by heart, every word to this song was engraved in his brain._

 _The moaning got louder as his heart did._

"I don't want to see you again."

 _Trying to pick up speed, he tried to run from_ _Her_ _grasp. This was wrong though, it was always somewhere familiar, like home, but this wasn't home._

 _Then again, he didn't want a home._

 _Or need one._

 _Home had never been pleasant._

 _Home had never been where his heart was._

 _SHE grabbed Toby, spinning him around to face her, to remember every goddam second of… of... Toby squeezed his eyes shut, glad that the involuntary tics didn't follow him into his dreams unwilling to see HER weeping sockets, crushed legs moving the ways they shouldn't as SHE balanced hap-hazard on them, all the cuts and bruises on HER and how SHE was so perfect even after the suspicious car accident matted HER blonde hair and sliced HER face._

 _…and that the wrong kid had died that day._

 _Finally opening his eyes to see the thing that was breathing hot and sticky on his face, he realized that he had the wrong tall blonde._

"Oh, shit."

 _Brilliant blue cat's eyes, instead of clouded over human ones stared back at him._

 _And teeth._

 _Teeth so big that the bearer couldn't even open its mouth wide enough to eat._

 _Despite this, she was so similar, yet so different from Toby's older sister._

 _Puck held him high in the air, slurring up at him, blood dribbling from the corners of her mouth as if begging him to make it all stop._

 _Her golden blonde hair, not Lyra's silky platinum, was pulled into the short, choppy pony tail Puck wore in gym class so that the shaved sides of her head wouldn't sweat as much, and her bangs weren't in the way. Same clothes, same way as the day it all went to Hell._

 _The same fear._

 _Red ribbons and toys avalanched down around them to the sound of crashing waves and static, melting in to…._

 _…_

 _…_

…accordion music?

Ears ringing, Toby jerked upright in bed, nightmare aborted before it could climax, to stumble across the floor and over to the window to find Laughing Jack happily playing an accordion in the tall weeds with more enthusiasm than skill, a crown of bright red poison ivy adorning his head like a low budget laurel chaplet.

"You! So, you are alive, no?" Grinning insanely, the gangling black-and-white clown tittered in at the shivering, twitching Toby. He released the flaming red squeezebox with the duct tape patched bellows so that it dangled awkwardly from its strap of knotted old jump ropes, holding out some stale, lint-covered Christmas ribbon candy, the kind of you find in an elderly relative's candy dish originally purchased on clearance the day after Labor Day in 1963 because it was cheap.

Toby slapped the nasty blob aside so that it stuck to the splintery floor of his cabin like a big red and white striped pimple, exclaiming, "What th-th-the Hhhhell are you doing here?" (TWITCH!)

"Today's your big day… KINGY-WINGY! Since you broke your alarm clock _again_ , S'Diya asked me…" Laughing Jack spread his noodlelike arms grandly, "…ME… Laughing…. Jack… …. …. Of…. All… people!" Laughing Jack's head fell forward, mouth gaping. One of his unnaturally long arms snaking behind him, he hooked a talon into the ring that stuck out from between his shoulder blades and gave it a long, hard, pull to the ratcheting of hidden gears. Jack's head snapped upright, and he resumed as if nothing had happened even as the string the ring was attached to slowly wound itself back inside his body, chortling, "…to wake you up any old way!"

Toby stared, left eye dancing independently of the right. "SO-YOU-DECIDED-TO-WAKE-UP-THE-ENTIRE-FUCKING-STATE-OF-OREGON?"

"Yeah. 'S funnier that way." Jack chortled as if it were perfectly normal for a wind-up black and white killer clown with cannibal teeth to provide reveille to a refugee camp for psychos by playing "Pop Goes the Weasel" very badly on an accordion in need of a mercy killing. "Not so loud, Kingy-Wingy – you'll wake the baaaaaaaaabyyyyyyy!"

Toby blinked, suddenly more impressed than pissed by Jack's creative interpretation of S'Diya's orders.

Knowing Jack, who reeked of armpits even in the dead of winter, it could have been worse.

It could have been bagpipes.

Now where was that axe?

 **"If Kim Kardashian does it, why not me?**

Maggie, who'd slept on her face all night, forgot why, and yawning, rolled over on her back.

And immediately rolled back over with a yip of pain.

Puck, who'd been watching from the top of the stairs, laughed, "Serve you right, Kimmy-poo!"

"Don't laugh. It's not nice!"

"I don't care what's not nice. You're big ol' fake butt's funny. Now it's all covered in stitches and looks like a popped balloon!"

"It's your fault!"

"I ain't the one who tried to hide in the crapper!" Puck jeered from the top of the basement stairs. "Damnnnnnnn gurrrrrlllll, you got dorky Dexter Igor grounded for unauthorized cosmetic aug-men-ta-tion. The Steins and Dexter's folks are like, really, REALLY _pissed_ – no Pokemon Tournament for him this weekend!"

Ew. Just, ew. WHY Maggie convinced Dorky Dexter to inject more and more saline into her temporary butt padding, which meant him actually touching her butt, Maggie now found herself wondering – Dexie was gross: all pimply and sweaty with greasy hair and an embarrassing crush on her.

As if!

But she'd played on that useful crush, getting him to add more and more to her trim little backside, building her sex appeal until yesterday when it all went horribly wrong. Puck, the traitor wouldn't leave her alone and the fight had begun in the cafeteria with EVERYBODY watching, until it raged out into the hall, and then into the girl's bathroom– OMG, so, _so_ not cool!

So, she'd locked the stall door behind her and stood on top of the toidy – only her twin came in yelling, "No use hiding, biyach! I hear you breathing!" And then, THEN, Puck SCRAMBLED OVER THE DOOR OF THE STALL.

NEXT THING MAGGIE KNEW the two of them were FIGHTING on the SEAT of the TOIDY, which broke off of the wall under their weight so that they LANDED ON THE FLOOR IN A GEYSER OF STANKY WATER and BROKEN TOIDY with her BIYACH of a SISTER on TOP as the TWO OF THEM CLAWED at each other while broken pieces of toidy POPPED her BEAUTIFUL KARDASHIAN DERIERRE… so that saline gushed down the back of her legs like she'd wet herself…

Not that anybody would notice: she was already drenched in sewer water and her TAIL, her beautiful fluffy TAIL, had fallen… OFF!

Worse, Uncle Mike broke down the stall door and wading through the gush of toidy water, clots of wet paper, and used tampons, hauled them still fighting out into the hallway while the WHOLE SCHOOL LAUGHED.

At Maggie.

The star.

They laughed even harder when grotty Toby Rogers handed Maggie her tail!

How could they?

"Suck it up, buttercup – we both get OSS for yesterday's circus act. Best of all?! You got us BOTH banned from tonight's big dance – but it's not like you had a _date_ or anything!" Puck jeered, adding, "Aaaaaaand… Uncle Mike and Aunt Raina have to pay for the broken crapper – that and now everybody knows your butt's fake, sooooooo (heh heh heh) WORTH ITTTTTTT!"

"You started it!"

"I'm not the one who tried to get Ms. Morgandorffer fired because I suck!"

"Biyach!"

"Flappy butt! Flappy butt!"

Mike, who was upstairs trying to shave in peace, closed his eyes, forehead against the mirror. The family life he'd hungered after since he'd been put into foster care at age fourteen, the family life he wanted for his nieces and Raina, was not materializing the way he wanted it to.

SLAP!

"I'm tellin' Uncle Mike!"

A few seconds later Mike pulled his fist out of the wall next to the bathroom mirror in a cloud of plaster dust, knuckles bleeding.

Obviously he wasn't working hard enough.

 **Junior**

Raina shifted in the rocking chair, taking Michael Joseph Jr. with her, his long legs and large vaguely-rabbity bare feet spilling over the arms, and resumed rocking. "So, a few more days of downloading and you can fully activate him?" She looked down at the boy's sleeping face. The resemblance to Mike was unsettling, even if the boy's thick, silky hair was a deep indigo and he had a slight overbite to go with his, ahhhhhhh, unusual ears.

He also didn't have Mike's broken nose.

"We're ahead of schedule, even with having to repair Maggie's broken tail and (ahem) _fanny_. I know about her and Dexter, but how did she break it again?" Vivica Stein frowned, delicate green face puzzled, "Frankie arrived just as your husband dragged Maggie and Puck out of the girl's bathroom screaming at each other. Then the principal showed up and shooed everyone away."

Raina adjusted the collection of family laundry that she'd wrapped Michael Jr. in, saying, "They've been fighting nonstop for weeks. Mike's at the end of his rope, and I don't know what to do any more. I'm not even sure that—" Raina cradled Mike Jr. closer, her rocking speeding up, "Introducing this little guy here right now is a good idea even if it's almost Mike's birthday."

"It's never the right time to bring a new life into the world." Vivica gave a wry laugh, "Trust me – we activated Frankie when we did because we felt that if we didn't, it would never happen – so we turned off the news for nine months and assembled her!"

The two women laughed, nervously.

"Keep rocking him, sing to him, interact with him – he's more aware of his surroundings than you'd guess. Let him learn what all of you smell like so that when we finally put him on full power he won't be so disoriented when he meets everyone for real – there's only so much set information we can feed into his brain. The rest is up to… uh oh, busted!" Vivica broke off, looking at the door of the small workroom off to the side of the family's main lab, "Seems we've let the bunny out of the bag. Yes, Puck, come in."


	31. Nearly There

_Halloween week, Salem, Oregon, Friday afternoon, October 201-, almost time for the dance!_

 **The Show Must Go On**

It was enough to make your fur fall out. NOT that Clawdeen Wolf, wardrobe mistress and costumer for this year's production of _Romeo and Juliet_ had held any hope of Maggie Schmidt being useful for anything more complicated than getting Clawdeen Diet Cokes from the Quick-E Mart a block down from Marston High while Clawdeen did all the actual work.

Like, you know, sewing.

Hemming.

Designing – which was a real challenge this year because for some reason, the cast was almost all RADS.

Standard humans were easy to sew for – one body was as good as another, but for Howl's sake, Clawdeen had to come up with a Renaissance-style costume for Tina Morph, who looked like a big roach that somebody had tricked out with things from a custom automotive shop. Or worse, the Sargent Brothers who were so big and muscular that they had to walk sideways through most doorways and tore any fabric that wasn't heavy-duty denim just by putting it on.

And thanks to Maggie and her big mouth, Clawdeen had to do all those costumes.

By herself.

Thanks a lot Maggie for having cow over not getting a part in the play when anybody with EARS knows why you didn't get the lead role, much the less a spear carrier in the background. Puh-leeeeeeeeze!

Worse, Maggie tried to get Ms. Morgandorffer, Clawdeen's favorite teacher even if she sucked at English, fired for discrimination.

Say, what?

Ms. Morgandorffer was not only one of those teachers who would help you with assignments from other teachers, she realized that Clawdeen was dyslexic. And then she'd quietly done everything she could to get Clawdeen help without telling the whole world that for Clawdeen, words on the page got up and rearranged themselves every time she looked away.

And that if Clawdeen was going to be a world-famous fashion designer, she was going to have to learn how to put a good sentence together so that she could get into Parsons in New York City next Autumn - and Ms. Morgandorffer was going to help her get in even if it killed the both of them because if Parsons was good enough for Donna Karen and Anna Sui, it was good enough for Clawdeen Wolf who would blow them both out of the water.

But Parsons and learning the rules of written English wasn't Clawdeen's problem at the moment. She'd never really liked Draculara's BFF. She wasn't a snob or anything, Clawdeen's dad and brothers worked with their hands for a living and Maggie's uncle Mike worked really, really hard after his day job as a cop for Clawdeen's dad to take care of Maggie, Puck (who was a mega-bitch for no reason that Clawdeen could see), and Raina his wife, but... but, Maggie was a _thief – from her own family!_

OMG! You don't steal from FAMILY. Everybody knows THAT!

Then Maggie got suspended for fighting with Puck – you can't work on the play if you get in that kind of trouble! So, because of Maggie's being a fathead, Clawdeen was gonna to have to do all the costuming by herself!

"Um…" Tina Morph nervously trilled down at Clawdeen from where Clawdeen had been trying to figure out how to rig some sort of bodice for her that didn't involve a block and tackle and possibly a logging chain.

The werewolf girl shook her head and looked up into the big girl's eyeless but earnest face, "Yeah?"

"Ummmm, I heard that Maggie got kicked off of the backstage crew and that she was supposed to be your… ummmmm, assistant?" Tina began nervously fiddling with both sets of hands and rocking back and forth in the cramped backstage area, "Ummm… ummmmm… but…. I…. ah… I don't know how to sew, but I want to learn, and I don't have all that many lines as Juliet's nurse so I have lots of time. I'm learning how to crochet! Could you use an extra set of hands or two?"

 **Standing Order**

Tedator nervously plowed his way down the hall through the milling students towards first hour Calculus with Gilda the tiny golem girl and her books carefully cradled in both huge hands.

He was doing this because his mentor had taken one look of him as he rehearsed being the balcony that the heroine of _Romeo and Juliet_ stood on before the first bell of the day rang and said, _"Don't you dare drop her."_

His mentor walked away, shaking his head, one hand over his funny-colored eyes (Eyes are supposed to be YELLOW, not BLUE!), mumbling something about how the hell would he fill out the accident report if Tedator DID?

Orders are orders, especially from your mentor.

So.

Tedator.

Would.

Not.

Drop.

Gilda.

Who… interestingly enough… was… a… GIRL?

A tiny GIRL, but a GIRL.

And GILDA who was a GIRL, was good at MATH.

And GILDA was in the same class that Tedator had just been reassigned to because he now understood Math for Jocks followed by PRE-Alegebra, BEGINNING Algebra and then ADVANCED Algebra.

That, and he wasn't supposed to drop GILDA.

Who apparently was made of the same stuff as his father's favorite eating basin.

Which broke into a million interesting pieces when dropped.

Tedator knew this because he dropped his father's previous favorite eating basin by accident two days before and then spent the rest of the weekend devising and then testing a formula for calculating how many pieces an eating basin would break into if you dropped it from varying heights when it landed on assorted surfaces.

Which led to Tedator being tossed out of his mother's bower by his parents (Something about being annoying – "Click pop rattle!" which roughly translated, meant: "Why aren't you over at your mentor's mate's Bower bothering them?") forcing Tedator to continue his gravitational research all over Salem once he'd modified his original calculations to account for barometric pressure, wind speed, and how many birds were nearby until all the local thrift and then the big box stores ran out of cheap eating basins.

And many, many other things that made a lovely "crash" when dropped.

It had been extremely satisfying. He was still compiling the data.

Satisfaction aside, Tedator wondered if GILDA, a GIRL who was good at MATH, would like a freshly punctured football.

It never hurt a buck who was on his way up in life to advertise.

 **The Fifty Buck Truck**

"Shit." Brian said, followed by, "Shit-shit-shit-SHIT!" and then, "Dammit Tim, ease up on the gas!" as the big white disreputable stake bed truck began careening down the winding street in the wealthy neighborhood just north of Salem proper, going 'round a corner with increasing speed as his business partner wrestled with the cracked steering wheel.

"Mumblemumblemumble, CAN'T!" was all he said.

"Why the hell not?" Brian stared at the big, elaborate mailbox decorated with pumpkins and corn stalks for Autumn they barely missed as it shot past his side.

"Mumblemumble – goddamned engine fell out!" They careened around another tight corner – this time on two bald tires, settling with a CRASH of loose tools and looser broken shingles. Why the hell couldn't rich people have straight streets like everybody else?

"WHEN?" BANG! (This time they didn't miss THIS mail box, something that looked like a big trout made of brass, or, well it _had…)_

"Mumblemumblemum—five seconds ago."

"Son of a bitch, that's what that noise was – so use the goddam brakes!"

"Mumblecoughmumblemble – they're with the engine!"

 _Tim and Brian, aka "Masky and Hoodie", proud new owners of the rusty white juggernaut now rattling and crashing its way down the picturesque street lined with faux log cabins big enough to house an entire trailer park in their cathedral ceilinged living rooms, acquired the truck last week from Vlad Tepes who wanted to turn a nearby patch ground into a McMansion farm or whatever._

 _Tepes gave them $50 to get the big white eyesore off the property under the condition they do so before sundown that day. How they disposed of it was their problem, not Tepes's._

 _Somehow, with the help of a Chilton manual they'd swiped from the public library, the bored bros managed to get the 1965 behemoth started after they'd put just enough air in the cracked, peeling tires to avoid riding directly on the rims so that…_

 _…somehow, with the help of whatever guardian angel that watches over widows, orphans and drunken fools (two out of three being both of them combined), they managed to get the rolling wreck with its rapidly deflating tires over the property line and on to the county road, where they…_

 _…pushed it for three hours to the Quick-E Mart half a mile away to gas it up._

 _Which took all of their hard-earned $50 plus whatever loose change they had on their dubious persons._

 _Rescue was an elderly woman wearing thick glasses driving a new Mercedes approaching them, quavering. "Would you two fine, upstanding young men like to make $100?"_

 _Would they?_

 _Hell yeah!_

 _She needed an antique mahogany dining room table moved from her summer house to her house in town. Seeing as they had a big truck, would they like the job? She also had beer. Did they like Pabst Blue Ribbon?_

 _Sold!_

 _Two hours later, full of PBR and $100 richer, with most of her prescription meds rattling loosely in Tim's trench coat pockets, they drove away trailing a black cloud of exhaust, planning big._

 _Proxying for the Slenderman was a great gig, but Slendy was fucking CHEAP. What was the point of running errands for a demon if the tight bastard never gave you any bummin' 'round money? Yeah, he gave you a place to live and the food was ok, but no money for beer and smokes!_

 _(OR Calvin Klein boxer shorts – that was Tim's gripe. Girls didn't like Fruit of the Looms – standard BVDs were DEAL BREAKERS. You want snatch? Calvin Kleins!_

 _But a big truck, dude, a big truck! Not only did a big truck give you mobility and something to pound on the side of when catcalling somethin' fine joggin' on the side of the road, a big truck was a source of income! (And pills! The same rich old baby boomers who wanted to pay them to move large heavy objects with their new coughing, rolling goldmine took waaaaaaaaayyyyyy too many pills. Even more than Calvin Klein boxer shorts, Tim loved him some pills! Get hired, move shit around, get paid, and pocket any pills left layin' 'round when Daddy and Mommy Warbucks weren't lookin' – oh yeah!_

 _Daaaaammmmmmmm, but life was fine when a dude had a big truck!_

 _("Aaaaand, mumblemumblemumble," Tim pointed out, a big truck meant they could STEAL BIG STUFF!)_

Only today, their rusty rolling pussy magnet decided to fall apart halfway through a job hauling old shingles to the nearby landfill for Wolf Brothers Construction.

Still, what did you expect? Their scow had been around since before they were born – it was part of the excitement – even if it meant crashing out of control through a wealthy neighborhood on a street modeled after a drunken snake – SPLATTTTT, the truck sideswiped a Tesla while flattening a big pumpkin, losing a few hundred broken shingles along the way. Grimly, Tim gripped the steering wheel, using the weight of his entire body to steer their landbound _Titanic_ as it skidded around yet another inconvenient but picturesque turn, slamming down on all four bald tires with a crash...

...only to swerve around a woman driving a Land Rover, forcing them to jump the curb and point right at a house. Tim, mumbling around a mouth full of random pills yanked the wheel hard right as Brian wondering if this was it for both of them braced himself for impact. Only the truck lumbered through a huge Fall display before flattening a fountain made up of naked young men frolicking around what might have been a big drooling bronze caterpillar standing on it's back end.

Then they came to a loud, abrupt two ton's worth of Detroit steel halt against a centuries old Douglas fir that the property owner and his husband had paid an awful lot of money to the developer to preserve when their Lincoln log McMansion was built last year.

The Douglas fir groaned, tipping over with a long, drawn out groan, missing the neighbor's house by inches before flattening their jacuzzi.

Followed by a long silence.

Whooping, Tim and Brian, aka, "Masky" and "Hoodie" staggered out of the truck in a cloud of beer and random pills. That was awesome!

But, Brian reflected as he and Tim slowly, painfully rolled the big truck backwards into their employer's Maze to the tune of approaching sirens, this was the last time they let Jeff help them in their attempt to make their new truck street legal— even if he was good with a welding torch and worked for pills!

 **The new baby, Uhhhhhhhhh, sort of.**

Puck slammed the steel drawer of the big filing cabinet in Medflight's little office at McNary Field shut with a loud, angry BANG.

Life sucked.

Really.

Sucked.

First she got OSS.

Then Aunt Raina wouldn't let her stay home unsupervised, so she'd had to come to work for free in Mediflight's office until it was time for Aunt Raina to drop her off at her real PAYING job because she was grounded from using her scooter because of the OSS.

And now she had another uncle.

Little brother? Cousin?

She'd walked in on Aunt Raina with the, boy… bunny… bunny boy… _whatever!_ semi-comatose on her lap.

At first, Puck thought it was Bon-Bon, the disgusting, pop-eyed little terror from her _Circus Baby_ days, but Aunt Raina and Vivica Stein, looking embarrassed, admitted that no, they'd initially tried to give the nasty little blue twat a body because it was only fair. But the only DNA that the Steins could find to work with, welllllll… Ummmmmm…. had been Uncle Mike's.

(Probably a leftover from when they'd killed him decades before.)

And that Raina didn't realize this when she'd asked the Steins to give the blue rabbit hand puppet, or the mentally challenged little girl with a speech impediment that animated it, a body like theirs.

The Steins, not knowing this, used Mike's DNA as the blueprint. A few months later they proudly presented Raina with a very large eight year old boy based on something found hidden in Uncle Mike's sock drawer.

With blue bunny ears.

And a slight overbite.

And big feet. Really big feet.

Who looked like a younger version of Uncle Mike, only with dark blue curls.

And NO Uncle Mike had no idea this was going on and-don't-you-dare-tell-him-until-we-figure-out-what-to-do-next… Not only was he supposed to be a girl, Mickey was going to be a Christmas surprise for Uncle Mike!

Mickey.

Mickey?

Who the hell names their kid after a Disney cartoon roden— well, ain't this just great! Why not just slap me silly and call me Ariana Grande?

Fuming, Puck didn't notice Raina standing in front of her holding out a battery pack. With a slight start, she took the pack and sullenly followed her aunt into the tiny break room, sat down at the battered Formica topped table, and plugged in.

"How the hell could you go an' have a baby?" Puck snarled without preamble, "Don't you know anything? Everybody knows the second the baby shows up, the man leaves!"

"What the hell are you talking about, Puck?" Aunt Raina, coffee cup half raised to her lips, snapped. She slammed the cup down and glared at Puck, who glared back. "Who's leaving?"

Puck looked away, anger suddenly deflated, to be replaced by uncomfortable memories of her 400 pound mother in their stiflingly hot welfare apartment in Watts, parked on the couch in front of the tv, shoveling Tastykakes and Kentucky Fried nonstop into her mouth with one hand, Diet Coke and a cigarette in the other, bitching and sweating as Puck and Maggie's numerous half-siblings, most still in diapers, milled stickily around on the dirty floor among the dogs as the boyfriend of the week shot their welfare check up his arm on his way out the door to wherever it was boyfriends went when they weren't groping you, beating you, or emptying the already mostly empty fridge.

"Uncle Mike." She said in a very, very tiny voice and then stared defiantly at her aunt.

Who stared back.

A small aircraft noisily taxied past outside on the nearby runway, making the windows rattle.

Finally, Aunt Raina picked up her coffee cup, and cradling it in both hands, leaned forward on her elbows, saying quietly, "I think you don't know your uncle as well as you think you do."

 **Do not open until Christms…** ** _never mind!_**

Mike, the kid who ALWAYS found the hidden Christmas gifts in July, had done it again.

Only he didn't know this as he looked down at the small boy with blue rabbit ears in a semi- fetal curl and hospital gown on the marble slab.

Punching the bathroom wall damaged his wrist, so he'd come home to see if he could get it fixed on his lunch break.

He'd entered the back door of the Stein house looking for Victor, who taught evening classes this semester and was home during the day.

He didn't find Victor, who was out playing golf.

He did, however, find a usually closed door, open.

Knowing that the Steins had a lot of private research going on, Mike'd started to pull the door shut when he caught a glimpse of what was in the little room off of the main lab.

The first thing he'd noticed was that someone had tacked the baby picture of himself that he'd given Raina years ago up on the wall, along with a lot of other pictures.

Pictures mainly used in building him the current body he was now wearing.

The second thing he noticed was that the boy was on half-power.

In addition to being the kid who always managed to find the Christmas gifts, Mike was also a.) a die-hard doodler who left a trail of cartoon bunnies, bass guitars, and hot rods behind him, and b.) a confirmed meddler with all things technological even when he shouldn't.

Not having something to doodle with as he studied the paperwork neatly stacked near the semi-comatose boy's head, Mike absentmindedly turned the child up to full power.

An hour later he found himself babysitting himself at Merston High; a happily chattering self in Puck's unisex clothing and Raina's favorite neon orange sneakers, tightly hugging the garish yellow teddy bear, new Crayola Crayons (92 and with a built-in sharpener!), and a _Spongebob Squarepants_ coloring book that Mike picked up on the way to back to work for himself at the Quick-E Mart to keep himself occupied and out of his hair because he didn't know how to turn himself _off_ and didn't dare leave himself _alone._

Oh, and the smaller version of Mike called himself "Mickey".

A name that Mike had almost completely forgotten.

 **Krispy Kritter**

OhhhhhhEMMMMMGEEEEEEEEE – Marlena pouted from where she sat toying with a vegan entrée flown up from L.A. that morning. There he was, tacky Toby, KING of tonight's Harvest Dance to Marlena's queen, in all his greasy glory.

Toby, who outdid himself this morning by not bothering to shave or comb the dead leaves out of his unruly dark curls, looked up from his battered _Scooby Doo_ lunch box worth of leftovers and grinned with yellowed teeth at Marlena across the cafeteria from the Outcast table.

Marlena threw up a little in her mouth. This wasn't fair. This wasn't right.

She _deserved_ Chad. Chad was _hers._

Only Chad was sucking face with that big blue hairy RAD bitch, what was her name? Abby? Scabby? Shabby? In between bites of the lunch she'd brought for the two of them over at the Jock table.

Chad was SUPPOSED to be at Marlena's side at the POPULAR table.

Feeling totally let down by the love of his, no, HER life, Marlena unsuccessfully tried to look away when Toby suggestively ran his tongue over his cold sore studded lips before waggling it and his eyebrows at Marlene.

Marlena, who was once Markus, threw up in her mouth a little more.

Anyway, where was Becca? The stupid bitch should have had the decency to show up for lunch and moral support even if she was now in the nearest Emergency room getting some sort of shots or whatever because her hands and face had swelled up all coated with blisters for no good reason, guh-rosssss! Leaving Marlena in the company of that fat pig, Mindy, who was stuffing her face as usual, getting fatter and fatter and paying no attention whatsoever to Marlena's pain.

As to Daddy, Daddy was no help at all– he even planned a media event tonight at the school because Marlena and Toby were LGBT groundbreakers. Go ahead, dad - throw me, your only daughter, (my two big sisters don't count, they never did) to the _werewolves!_

Marlena gasped, hands over her mouth, smearing her lipstick, vegan entrée falling to the floor unheeded.

Oh.

No.

He.

DIDN'T!

Toby flashed Marlena a, "If you liked that, you're gonna LURV this!" smirk and then, slowly, sensually… tugged at one of his huge scabs… peeling the big brown lip crust appalling centimeter by appalling centimeter away…

And then…

And then…

With a flourish…

Like a circus sword swallower…

Toby tipped back his head…

Opened wide…

And slowly, sensuously… OMG, no! No!

Swallowed it whole.

Markus came to minutes later in the school nurse's office with a bump on his head. Remembering that he was really a she, Marlena sat up, rubbing at the unfashionable goose egg on her head. A seasoned bulimic, she barfed up everything she'd ever eaten in her life into the waste basket by the cot.

 **Rub some bacon on it.**

Good deed for the day complete, Toby watched satisfied as the basketball coach and the lunchroom monitor loaded Markus or Marlene or whoever he/she was today onto a gurney and cart Merston High's Chief Drama Queen out of the cafeteria, savoring the last of the leftover slice of bacon that S'Diya slipped into his lunch box this morning as a special surprise when he wasn't looking.

You know, maybe he'd show up to the dance tonight after all. Markus... Marlena's reaction to his little sleight of pork was almost as entertaining as the time Laughing Jack got one of his noodly arms caught in the industrial grade lawn sprinkler in front of the main dining lodge, spinning the howling Jack around three times before sending him screeching across the newly seeded lawn and into a puddle.

 **A Cozy for Every Crazy**

Eyeless Jack (No relation to Laughing Jack), aka: E.J., in his usual state of stoner boredom, suddenly realized that he'd just been "cozied".

"HEY!" Startled out of his general disinterest in his fellow psychopaths (or life, for that matter) Jack unsuccessfully tried to rip off the hand-crocheted ugliness assaulting him. It was dark blue with dark grey stripes on it.

And fluffy.

Really… fluffy.

In a cheap polyester sort of way.

 _Who the hell thought it was a good idea to donate cheap 1970s yarn in dreadful colors along with matching DIY yarn books to Sanctuary?_

Stiffly getting up from his _Animal Planet_ marathon, stomach growling for its weekly kidney, E.J. shuffled towards the big institutional kitchen fighting his way out of the unsolicited cozy.

Cozy or not, at this point everybody called E.J. the resident old lady.

He barely moved, and only ate once or twice a day (when he remembered to), and never enough to make him fat (when he did). E.J. mostly slept on the dining hall couch, television yammering 24-7, occasionally getting up to take a piss or download a deuce; mostly infesting in the main hall. This was because E.J. couldn't remember which cabin was his. (So what if it was RIGHT NEXT to the dining hall, bright red, and had his name nailed by his roommate in six inch brass letters to the door?)

Now that he was up, E.J. decided to turn off the idiot box and maybe, just MAYBE, do one of the things that S'Diya was always ragging at him to do.

Speak of the seven-foot demon, here she was.

Great.

"Did you just put a cozy on me?" E.J. dropped the ugly thing to the floor and kicked it under a nearby table.

"Cozies are for hiding unattractive things that lie around doing nothing. Believe me, you're not the only one that lies around here doing nothing!" With one set of hands S'Diya threateningly shook a huge black and white striped cozy topped with a bright red pompom in the direction of Laughing Jack who towered over the others, contentedly sharpening his teeth with a half brick as he leaned against the empty rusty flagpole, adding, "Go catch Laughing Jack for me."

E.J. followed her gaze. Mr. Widemouth was the ruffly 1970s Harvest Gold, Burnt Orange, and Avocado Green crocheted lump-thingy with huge ears sticking out of it blundering over and over again into Laughing Jack's knees and then at Lazari, who kept whacking the self-propelled mound of Red Heart with a big stick. E.J. THEN glanced at the other Jack and the other Jack's broken brick, decided the effort wasn't worth a half brick to the face, and shook his head, "Nope!" and bolted

S'Diya blocked E.J.'s run at the back door, waving his recently shed cozy.

"If you won't wear my creation, let's havva look at ya!" Dropping E.J.'s cozy, she tucked Laughing Jack's huge cozy under one arm and grabbed E.J.'s face with one hand while another poked at his torso under his baggy grey sweatshirt. "You've lost more weight – that's not healthy." She handed him a pb and j left over from lunch from a nearby table, "Here, eat this!"

E.J. accepted the leftover sandwich like it was a dead rat, glaring up at her from eyeless sockets.

S'Diya ignored his anger, adding "After that, for once in your wasted life, DO somethin' productive! What if _He_ needs ya?"

Chewing, E.J. decided not to answer as S'Diya led him out into the chilly air of late Fall.

 _'Winter already? Wasn't it just June?'_

Set up on the porch beside the old picnic table was S'diya's ancient treadle sewing machine. Spending the afternoon with S'Diya learning to sew, hem, and patch, was the beginning of E.J.'s unwanted transformation into someone vaguely useful.

 **Dejection**

Sargent sat with drooping mandibles after work, watching her mate create yet another exquisite eating basin from molten glass out behind the abandoned factory he was slowly transforming into the most amazingly beautiful Bower she'd ever seen.

Out of the fifteen she-pups in Ruby's Brownie troop, only five had shown up to the meeting last Thursday after she announced on the troop Facebook page that she was going to take over leadership.

Five, including Ruby and weird little Marlys with her sticky up hair that refused to lock no matter what Sargent did.

The remaining three were she-pups that hadn't done so hot in other troops for one reason or another.

She had so been looking forward to company that wasn't male, work-related, or under the age of sixteen.

She missed going Bower to Bower in family groups like when she'd been a pup, exchanging gifts and doing each other's dreadlocks.

She missed hunting with the other Matrons and Maidens, spear in hand, baby on her back, and terrified dinner fleeing for its life ahead of the pack.

She even missed harvesting fruit on one world or another as a group when the flotilla she'd been born into made one of its many automatic stops and drying it for later meals against the hot engine baffles.

She sighed, a soft hooting noise, picking up an unprotesting Ruby and Marlys, putting them on her lap for a long, sad hug, heavy dreads draped disconsolately around the two pups.

Had M'Binte been there in person, she would have patted the giant _Yautja_ Matron consolingly on the shoulder while handing her a steaming hot cup of Windex window cleaner.

Sargent sighed again, a long, drawn out quavering hoot and a rattling of mandibles.

Was it something she said?

 **Itchity Itch**

Grinning, Jeff looked down at his red, swollen hands.

The beautiful bouquet he had dum-dum Becca deliver to his intended's locker made every last blister visibly rising on his pallid skin worth it.

Next time, he'd con Laughing Jack into picking a poison ivy bouquet for him.

Or maybe Mr. Widemouth.

Better yet, Brian or Tim.

They'd cheated him on that last batch of pills.

Poison ivy lasts longer than cut brake lines.

Or loosened engine supports.


	32. Intermission

**And now, a word if you will?**

 _Halloween until two years ago had been a fairly simple float in the parade of days any given year, until, well, Frankie Stein._

 _For many, after Frankie unintentionally caused a small, relatively peaceful Civil Rights uprising by refusing to wear flesh-colored base makeup over her pale green skin or hide her neck bolts with a turtle-neck sweater in order to "pass", Halloween in Salem, Oregon became problematic._

 _As in:_

 _1\. Do you make like you and your parents and their parents and their parent's parents and have great big tacky fun celebrating the one holiday out of the year that openly acknowledges Death even if Death happens to be wearing a silly hat while TP-ing your house?_

 _2\. Or do you boycott traditional Halloween masks and decorations because they are grossly unfair representations of an oppressed minority who have thoughts, feelings and opinions of their own who are also your co-workers, fellow students, neighbors, and a certain elected official in the City Council who'll see to it that you repeatedly get fined for having a messy yard if you don't cool it with those cheap glow in the dark plastic Drac fangs? Anyway, this shit can get you fired!_

 _Microagressions aside, most adopted #2 by replacing Halloween with Fall Harvest or the more generic Autumn, because:_

 _1\. Everybody likes pumpkins or at least tolerates them as long as they aren't in their latte._

 _2\. Everybody likes apples, (unless you're allergic or prefer oranges). Decorating with apples, lots of apples, was good for the local growers. Plus, you can always eat them afterwards. The apples, not the growers. Unless your name is Eyeless Jack._

 _3\. Pretty corn was all right as long as you didn't refer to it with outdated, racist terms like "Indian" and opted for "Indigenous". Better yet, play it safe and refer to it as "gem corn" - this was reasonably safe._

 _4\. Corn shocks and hay bales, though messy, are fairly innocuous. However, scarecrows are iffy unless you keep them Anime grade Kawaii while reflecting the diversity of your community in a respectful manner._

 _5\. Gourds? The more the merrier. But not lumpy gourds – lumpy gourds are offensive._

 _6\. …and few can find much to be offended by when it comes to colorful Autumn leaves. As long as you compost them afterwards in a responsible manner._

 _Following popular opinion as well as wanting to avoid unwelcome controversy, Fall Harvest, Autumn, was celebrated rather than Halloween by most public entities, including Merston High._

 _Whose suddenly controversial Halloween dance become a more or less noncontroversial Harvest dance._

 _Complete with non-gender specific temporary elected official and non-gender specific temporary elected official of the Harvest, and leaves._

 _Lots of leaves._

 _No trouble there, right?_


	33. Hell Is Where You Find It

_Halloween, excuse me, Harvest Night., Salem, Oregon, October 201-_

 **A Pleasant Evening's Stroll**

Sebastian, the dark-haired man, shadow rolling out before him on the sidewalk in the light of the crescent moon over his left shoulder, paused, a thin sickle of a grin glinting in the shadows of his face.

This was a night when some claimed that the gates of Hell opened, allowing its occupants out for a romp.

Sebastian begged to differ – the un-bribeable J. Iscariot, Esq., more Hell's restroom attendant than Hell's gatekeeper, preferred to sit off to the side drinking heavily but unable to get drunk, and watch whatever slithered, drooled, hopped, flopped, or sauntered casually in and out of Satan's front door even as St. Peter somewhere, everywhere, and nowhere, scrupulously checked I.D.s so that traffic in and out of the Pearly Gates was backed up both ways for millennia and doubtlessly would always be.

Sebastian, at the side of his heavily limping master, knew all about sauntering in and out of the front gates of Hell.

An original staffer, he'd attended the ribbon cutting ceremony and found it terribly, _terribly_ amusing, even if the canapes had been stale, the champagne flat, and Beelzebub and his boyfriend Belial dreadfully boring with their nonstop yammering about real estate investments, their building going condo, and 401K retirement plans.

For the sake of old times, Sebastian would provide Mr. Iscariot with a six-pack, and a plate of apple ruggalach on his rare days off. The two work friends would sit watching the non-stop four-lane flow of traffic, discussing the weather (Always dreadful.), how things had gone downhill since they'd both taken their respective jobs (What else is new?), pension cuts (To non-existent pensions.), and the latest celebrity news (Forever. Mediocre.) blatantly cheating each other at pinochle.

This too, was terribly, _terribly_ amusing.

Ciel Phantomhive, Sebastian's master, almost as tall as he, as slim, as beautiful, with his eye patch and silken dark hair, leaned heavily on Sebastian tonight, punishing himself, proving Sebastian's private opinion that Hell had stopped being a specific place exactly five seconds after Eve took her first bite and then handed the used apple to Adam, and became a state of mind and therefore, everywhere – the physical address of #1 Sheol Drive, a mere formality.

As ongoing proof, Lord Phantomhive, one of the richest men in the world with an near infinite lifespan and wealth, chose to wear the heavy wood, steel and leather prosthetic he'd been fitted with in 1914 after a shell from the Army he was part of landed in its own trenches in a sudden volcano of fire in the night while a skull gaped up at the moon, killing everyone that he'd ever loved except for his silly wife Lizzie and her personal maid, Mey-Rin who'd been left behind in England for obvious reasons.

Because Phantomhive alone survived out of the men that came from his estate to fight for king and country, he who could create a prosthesis so perfect that unless you saw him naked you would never know he only had only one leg, chose to wear steel and leather straps that dug into what remained of his leg, an ulcerated, scarred stump.

To remind himself that some mistakes can never be erased.

Yes.

The Buddhists had it right, Sebastian reflected.

Hell was indeed, _everywhere._

 **Trunk or Treat**

Smiling benevolently Father Tom ambled through the crowd of children and adults milling around Queen of Peace's back parking lot, enjoying the crisp air coming off of the mountains. Overhead, huge work lights provided by Wolf and Sons illuminated the space, showing off the corn shocks, apple garlands, artfully displayed mounds of gourds and pumpkins, and the branches of colored leaves that the Wolf family spent most of the afternoon arranging.

Pausing by the entrance of the hay bale maze, he adjusted the orange, rust, and gold leaf surplice that Clawdeen Wolf and her mother embroidered for him over his shoulders. He had been shocked when Mr. Wolf and his entire family, who had been attending Mass and getting married at Queen of Peace for generations, following Frankie Stein's lead, outed themselves to him one early morning two years ago before Mass on Sunday morning.

They looked so, well, _normal._

That night after praying alone in one of the side chapels, he called his bishop, who called, who called… at that point, Father Tom lost track of who was talking to whom, and just waited.

Eventually, the answer came back: let them stay.

And that was it.

Which led to the problem of Halloween, of Trick or Treating. Or rather: Trunk or Treat – when the entire parish got together on Halloween night, decorated their cars, and during the big family safe party, handed out treats to whatever children appeared, Catholic or not.

Problem was, it was embarrassing having parish children show up as bad imitations of some of their most active members – particularly if they were the ones who helped organize the event and kept the chili and cider pots simmering and the hot dogs, hamburgers and Boca Burgers sizzling off to one side for the adults while the kiddies collected cheap peanut butter taffy and candy corn.

Then there was the issue of property maintenance: Clawdeen's family always made sure that Queen of Peace and its grounds, were kept in immaculate order.

For free.

After even _more_ praying and a long discussion over tea and apple rugalach with his best friend the Rebbe from the nearby Synagogue, Father Tom announced firmly that because it was wrong to make fun of your neighbors no matter WHAT they looked like, Trunk or Treat was still on, BUT, there were going to be some changes.

Important changes.

In other words: for the last two years all attendees were to wear Autumn colors and crowns made of colored paper leaves to the annual Festival of Gratitude instead of plastic fangs and monster masks.

If you didn't like it, you could always stay home.

 **RAD, Like Me**

Rachel Darcy had been born as white as they came.

But from an early age she believed with every atom of her being that if you identified with something, you WERE that something.

Especially if it got you what you wanted.

At the age of six Rachel identified as a rutabaga until her German-American grandmother took her aside and gently explained what a rutabaga was.

No doubt unpopular root vegetables dipped in wax for longer shelf-life have their place in the Universe, but soon after that little clearing up of details, Rachel announced that she identified as a sheep.

Problem was, sheep get eaten by wolves.

Messily.

 _Not exactly_ a career choice that even a die-hard social justice warrior in training would care to make.

Rachel over the next decade identified with a number of things, inanimate and otherwise, until at age sixteen, after binge watching the entire "Roots" series on DVD found herself identifying so strongly with Kunta Kinte and the black lawyer and his family who lived two doors down in her gated community that she declared herself black.

Rachel Darcy, now R'achel Kinte's Orange County family, long used to such changes in identity, didn't even blink when she deliberately overpermed her blonde hair so that it fluffed into a 'fro and demanded a tanning bed and dark contact lenses for Christmas.

Now dark as she could be, R'achel struck gold.

Which later turned to pyrite after gaining a prestigious professorship teaching African American Studies at a historically black Midwestern university after a group of students who came from poor mainly black communities, curious about her, tracked R'achel Kinte down to Rachel Darcy – and a set of wealthy Orange County parents who proudly showed them R'achel's birth certificate, their own birth certificates, and tattered immigration papers from Germany, Ireland, and Poland dating back to the early 1900s.

Screaming "I IDENTIFY as black, obviously I'm BLACK!" while sporting naturally golden box braids studded with antique African trade beads, R'achel packed up her diplomas and her tanning bed and disappeared into the community colleges of the Pacific Northwest until Frankie Stein and the RADS came out into the open, requesting that they too, get a piece of the pie.

Not as imitation mainstream humans, but as themselves, whatever it might be.

R'achel promptly moved from Tacoma, WA to Salem, OR, claiming not only black heritage, but that she too, was a werewolf, and therefore RAD.

Two oppressed minorities, no THREE (because, _w.o.m.a.n._ , y'know) for the price of one.

So what if the only thing that ever happened to R'achel, now "R'achel Kinte-Redfang" during a full moon was a really, really heavy period?

So what if she was violently allergic to anything even remotely resembling a dog – including wolves? Antihistamines are easy to come by!

So, so what? If you identify strongly enough as something, you ARE that something. Anybody who doesn't see this is deplorable.

Anyway, R'achel the rising star's triple whammy gained her such a firm, rapid foothold in Oregon's Democratic Party that Rep (D) John Barleycorn, a privileged member of the white patriarchy with his Ivy League education, Rhodes Scholarship, and Country Club memberships, was getting nervous about keeping his seat in the Oregon legislature with her around.

Hmmmmm…. State Rep (D) R'achel Kinte-Redfang, has a nice ring to it., No, _SENATOR_ R'achel Kinte-Redfang!

Why mess with being the leader of a local minority defense group when you can take a seat in the legislature? Why not the Governor's office? Forget the local small stuff, aim for the White House!

Discreetly adjusting her taxidermied white wolfskin chest ruff as she pulled into the crowded Merston High parking lot in her new hot pink Land Rover, freshly oiled golden dreads cascading down her back and over the shoulders of her leopard spotted sequined Versace original, R'achel Kinte-Redfang and her entourage got ready to steal the media spotlight from John Barleycorn and his whiny son who was pretending to be trans just to get the LGBT vote.

Nobody likes a poser.

 **"The Halloween hail naw!" or, "A lovely night out with the family."**

Completely unaware of the ethical dilemma posed by Halloween, Patador Sargent decided that he and his family would participate in the _ooman_ annual festival of redistribution of wealth aka "Halloween" that was so like the festivals of sharing he remembered as a pup.

If nothing else, a night out in her best armor might cheer Sargent up – lately her mandibles had been disturbingly limp.

Running his own mandibles teasingly up and down Sargent's back, Patador convinced his mate to oil her dreads to a high gloss with WD-40, don her best body armor, and buff her blades while he wrestled Ruby into her formal Big Maiden armor.

Ruby hated her formal Big Maiden armor. It didn't have "Hello Kitty" painted on the breastplate like her everyday armor and was itchy.

But if one didn't make a good impression on the bowers one visited, one did not get nice things.

In other words, Ruby had to put on her Big Maiden armor _or else._

Patador, in his hastily buffed spear carrier's armor, had to admit that his family was impressive – so impressive that the first door they knocked on after politely removing their breathing masks, the _ooman_ who answered the door gave the proper traditional shriek of hospitality while hurling what later turned out to be a whole pound of bacon at them before slamming the door shut.

Other bowers, when approached, yielded apples, a frozen turkey, something called a "meatloaf", something else called "tofu" (which they buried out back because it might be poisonous), another something else called "macaroni and cheese hot dish" (which they cautiously sampled and heartily approved of), and a whole unopened bottle of Windex to wash down the hot dish with along with a rag to polish their mandibles with afterwards.

That, and a basket of laundry, mostly socks, which cheered Sargent up: Fred and Ted had just worn out their third set of the month; they wouldn't have to buy socks for another week.

 _Oomans_ were not only astonishingly wealthy, but astonishingly generous!

 **Meanwhile in the Trailer Park**

"Bitch! Dinner sucks!"

SLAP!

Behind a locked door, Marlys cowered under her bed, keeping the spiders company.

Mom and Brandon were at it again.

CRASH!

She flinched in the dark as something heavy tipped over, shaking the entire trailer.

It's not like this was anything new: Jason had hit her mom whenever she forgot to bring home enough bud.

"Whore!"

The guy who came after Jason also hit her mom.

And the one after that.

CRASH!

And the one after _that._

"Slut!"

But this Brandon dude? Wow!

Normally when things got this bad, she'd go over to Tina's trailer, but Tina was at the big Harvest Dance with the rest of the big kids. After she'd accidentally incubated Tina two years ago, Marlys was really wary about going over there when Tina wasn't around to keep things under control.

"Bastard!"

SMACK! Followed by, "Don't! Don't!"

She could go to Ruby's house. It was a weird sort of a house, but people were nice to each other there even if they looked like something out of a Netflix mini-series.

Anyway, Ruby's house was over a mile away and it was starting to rain, so walking was o.u.t. As for a ride, Marlys couldn't get to her mom's cell phone to call Ruby and ask if Mr. Sargent could come get her.

Because tonight was different.

Brandon really meant it.

The trailer shook again.

Shaking, Marlys curled more tightly around her Barbie doll, the one whose hair was one big dread, hoping that it would be over soon.

 **273D**

"273D? 10-4!" M'Binte said from the screen of the iPad. She scanned the list of provided police codes and frowned, domestic violence, felony.

M'Binte frowned even deeper when she realized that she recognized the address.

Still, a job was a job. She relayed it to Sargent in a series of rattles and clicks. Sargent had been called in on her night off because the Harvest Dance over at Merston High had turned into a media circus; all off duty officers were needed for crowd control.

Lights flashing, Sargent's modified truck and another black and white inched their way out of the milling school parking lot before reaching open road where they screamed their way towards the Kalapuya Gardens Trailer Park

 **Babysitting at Work**

Puck, still in her Chuck E. suit, looked down at Mickey where he stood holding his teddy bear and his coloring books forlornly watching Uncle Mike book out the front door of _Chuckie's_ and into the downpour towards the work truck he'd borrowed from Wolf and Sons.

"273D" didn't mean a damned thing to her, and wasn't this Uncle Mike's night off?

Only he'd looked down at the radio clipped to his shoulder halfway through his explaining why Mickey was running along behind him and not on the slab where he belonged. A stream of numbers crackled in the sudden silence on in the café portion of _Chuckie's_. Uncle Mike went all "cop" – saying, his voice tense, "Kalapuya? A knifing? Three blocks away? 10-4 – Puck, there's been a stabbing with a still active assailant on the scene. Watch Mickey until Aunt Raina can come get him."

Seconds later there was a flashing light on the roof of the Wolfe truck as he backed out of the parking space and sped off down the street.

Shit.

"Oooooohhhh, Puck, so you've got a travel-sized Uncle? What's your name little Uncle?" Linda, the hostess and wife of Bob the fry cook hunkered down to study the bunny boy, whose thumb crept up into his mouth.

"Mickey." He mumbled around the digit.

"Hey, he's got a hat like mine!" 8-year-old Louise, Bob and Linda's youngest daughter, who wore a pink bunny hat 24-7, trotted over, hands out. "It's blue, like the ice cream brand! Wanna trade?"

She reached for Mickey's ears, which nervously pulled away from her on their own.

"No Louise, I think those are part of his head." Tina, Louise's big sister quickly intercepted her little sister's grabby hands, adding flatly. "You don't want to Scotch tape them back on like last time, do you?"

"Cool! Can you do tricks with them?" Gene, the only boy in Bob and Linda's family leaned in on the much taller Mickey, who backed away so that he was pressed against Puck, "I can fart the alphabet in 4/4 time. Wanna hear?" Gene eagerly switched on the little keyboard he was never seen without.

"NO!" Everyone in the room including Puck in her Chuck E. suit exclaimed, except for Louise. Louise, always the rebel in any situation, shrieked "YES!"

"I have a _TAKER!"_ Keyboard playing a canned intro, Gene assumed a semi-crouch. Everyone but Louise stepped back.

"Oh no you don't, my little Liberace!" Linda grabbed Gene by the elbow and passed his twittering ass off to Bob, who'd come from around the counter, spatula in hand, "Bob, deal with Mr. Showbiz and his amazing ass here – he's your child! Mickey, would you like a burger and fries?"

Mickey looked up at Puck with huge sky-blue eyes, thumb firmly in place.

"I'm not even sure he CAN eat, but he might need a drink of water." Puck shrugged.

"I don't get it. Every week you have a blueberry burger, pink lemonade, and sweet potato fries…" Thick glasses glinting, Tina studied Mickey and Puck.

"Sometimes I need a little protein and sugar to keep things running." Puck mumbled, in no mood to explain exactly how her new more or less organic body worked in between sessions under a sunlamp and plugging into whatever wall socket happened to be around. "And… I really like blueberries."

Only nobody was listening as they tugged Mickey to a booth, Linda behind them carrying a big to-go cup of water and a straw exclaiming. "Now kids, be nice to your new little friend so Puck can entertain the kiddies having a Harvest party in room 3. Puck, I _mean_ Chuck E., get going, I hear chairs being thrown – we'll watch little Harvey for you until your aunt arrives…" Linda paused, blinking rapidly, lips moving, before adding, "In exactly 15 minutes."

Thank.

God.

 **Meow.**

Cleo de Nile was having a wonderful time.

Granted, she wasn't the center of attention, but this, given the circumstances, was still wonderful.

Deuce her boyfriend and date for the evening, was hawt – enhancing Cleo's shimmering Christian La Croix micro-dress and the gilded platform sandals and cobra-themed jewelry she'd designed herself.

Her best buds and their dates all _slayed_ – discreetly arranged so that they surrounded Cleo like purple velvet does a crown jewel so that she sparkled among the fall leaves, pumpkins, and corn shocks of Halloween, _ahem,_ HARVEST.

Clawdeen and that big bug girl, what was her name? Teeny? Tiny? Tina? Had outdone themselves as part of the decorating committee earlier in the day. At the rate she was going, what's-her-face might earn herself a place in Cleo's entourage, but only if she kept to the back of the group.

And wore a burka.

A big one.

A smirking Cleo carefully arranged herself and the others in among the CNN and FOX camera crews so that when the time came, she would get a full view of Markus, or whatever he called himself these days, having to be nice to disgusting little Ticci Toby up on the stage because the world was watching.

She really, REALLY hoped Toby would show up in a too-small lime green double-knit polyester leisure suit, basketball socks, and black and white saddle shoes.

Better yet, a conga shirt with pit stains and toreador pants with a ripped-out seat and a thong – oh, dis gonna be good!

 **Lane Bryant**

Not having Becca to hide behind no thanks to the rash that turned out to be major poison ivy keeping her BFF home and soaking in calamine lotion, Mindy stood miserably by the punch and cookie table which was staffed by Ms. Goode.

Ew.

in a Lane Bryant pant suit eating sugar cookies shaped like Autumn leaves.

Mindy, not Ms. Goode, who was wearing a "Give Peace a Chance" t-shirt and dowdy denim skirt over her ususal Birkenstocks and socks.

Double ew.

She'd a beautiful deep red dress that set off her dark eyes, hair and skin perfectly.

In her closet.

In the original store bag.

With the tags still on it.

Unworn.

Because she'd gained another ten pounds since she'd bought it last month just for tonight.

So, she'd had to borrow her mother's brown and green Lane Bryant velvet pantsuit because Marlena insisted she be there. Becca had insisted she be there. It would be the three of them, ruling.

The shoes she'd bought to go with the dress, were still in their box.

They didn't go with the borrowed pantsuit.

Which was the only thing that fit at such short notice.

With flats. Plain brown flats.

As in "mom shoes".

This automatically put four more cookies in Mindy's mouth.

"Yo." Somebody sidled up to her in among the students, teachers, and news reporters.

Mindy paused mid-cookie.

It was greasy, pimply Dexter Igor.

Who lived three doors down in Mindy's gated housing development – his parents were ONLY chiropractors and drove last year's BMWs while Mindy's parents were neurosurgeons and drove next year's Mercedes.

"What do _you_ want?" she sighed, crumbs bitter on her tongue.

"Wanna dance?" With a big goofy grin, Dexter gestured to where some of the less popular kids gyrated awkwardly near the empty thrones while stepping over cables and dodging cameramen. He was wearing frayed khakis, a plain white shirt with red suspenders, red sneakers and a moth-eaten Harris tweed jacket that stank of mothballs.

And a bow tie.

Topped by a… was that a FEZ?

O.M.G. Just shoot me!

Howeverrrrrr, Dexter didn't look so bad in this light.

Hmmmmm...

All he needed was a good skincare regimen.

Aaaaaaand, he _was_ the first boy of any sort to EVER ask Mindy to dance.

Forgetting the shame of wearing her mother's Lane Bryant pantsuit on Marlena's big night, and being asked to dance for the first time by the son of two chiropractors, Mindy put the cookies back on the tray beside her, saying, "Yes. I'd... _I'd love to!"_

 **Knock Down? Drag Out!**

Fuming, Marlena slumped in one of the paper mach _e_ thrones reserved for Autumnal royalty, texting on her hot-pink rhinestone studded iPhone, elected partner nowhere in sight.

Neither was Becca – the traitorous bitch was home all coated with (eye roll here) POISON IVY blisters and calamine lotion and not answering Marlene's texts – some BFF!

As for that cow, Mindy, Mindy was already stuffing her face over by the punch bowl. And Chad was sucking face with that RAD freak Abbie Bominable. Typical!

And daddy? Daddy was off to the side, ready to come out and start shaking hands the second the Harvest crowns were placed on heads.

Checking his watch.

When Daddy wasn't checking his watch, Daddy was giving Marlena in her Versace original the stinkeye for wasting time Daddy could have used to accept bribes or whatever it was Daddy did.

Not far away that R'achel Kinte-Redfang _person_ and her goon squad of inner city types with no taste in tattoos whatsoever glowered at everybody, ready to slap a cap on somebody's ass – ohhhhhh, puhleeeeeeeeese! Kinte-Redfang only crashed Marlena's coronation to start something the way she always did with her usual boring crap about social justice, the patriarchy, and white privilege.

Or her usual long rant about cultural appropriation.

What-everrrrrrrr!

That was when…

…the.

Police.

Stepped.

In.

R'achel Kinte-Redfang and her personal assistants could stay as long as they behaved.

If she didn't, the cops were willing to face her threatened race riot even if it was in front of three major networks and five local ones.

Further humiliation avoided— no, wait for it, wait for it! Marlena sat up, eyes wide with horror. R'achel WAS WEARING the SAME VERSACE ORIGINAL and R'ACHEL looked BETTER in it THAN HE, _no,_ SHE DID!

"You RAD… you RAD… YOU RAD _BIYACH!"_ Marlena rose to her feet, hands on hips, nostrils flaring.

It was bad enough that Marlena had been stood up in front of the entire world by a social outcast who moved like he was constantly being tasered, but the fact that some wanna-be RAD with a bad weave and worse eye makeup ripped off her look?

No.

"I got your smackdown, right _here, biyach!"_ Marlene Barleycorn snarled, professionally applied lipstick accentuating the whiteness of her capped teeth. Hurling the iPhone aside, she stepped forward, and unable to do what she wanted to do to Ticci Toby for standing her up she launched her skinny frame across the dance floor with a loud screech to the thunder of size 12 stiletto, manicured nails out and ready for battle with R'achel Kinte-Redfang in front of most of the Merston High School student body, half the police force of Salem, Oregon, and as mentioned earlier, two major cable news networks and three locals.

By the time the cops pulled Marlena off of R'achel Kinte-Redfang, Merston High's most vocal LGBT activist had ripped out generous handfuls of the Voice of all RADs and People of Color's expensive golden real human hair extensions in showers of genuine African cowrie shells even as the Voice of all RADS and People of Color yanked Marlena's highly realistic silicone breast enhancers out of Marlena's bra and was slapping her with them while her L.A. entourage milled around, concealed weapons out as they heedlessly trampled her wolfskin chest toupee underfoot.

On national cable television.

And three local networks.

As Cleo de Nile gave the whole ugly but entertaining brawl a standing ovation with beautifully manicured, naturally brown hands that smelled of frankincense and myrrh from the sidelines, Marlena escaped the two officers trying to handcuff her, and on national cable television, managed to tear a big chunk out of the back of Kinte-Redfang's gown before both were tasered as Kinte-Redfang's "personal secretaries" found themselves being arrested by a bunch of small town cops.

But not before one of them managed to fire a stolen police Glock.

The shot went wild, hitting the overhead disco ball, showering everyone with cheap plastic mirror fragments.

The ratings soared through the roof, and YouTube clips went viral. As for memes? Oh yes, the MEMES!

 **A Pleasant Evening's Viewing**

In the darkened high school office Vlad Tepes sat smoking a cigar in the principal's big leather chair, watching the whole debacle that he hadn't authorized unfold on the school's security system.

He leaned back, a thin grin on his pointed face.

Authorized or not, some problems took care of themselves.

All it took was a call to the right, _ahem_ , people.


	34. Thinly Sliced Pastrami on Rye

_Halloween, excuse me, Harvest Night., Salem, Oregon, October 201-_

 **Revenge is best served with coldcuts. And BBQ potato chips. Baked, not fried.**

And as for for Ticci Toby, the Harvest King to Marlena's Harvest Queen, Ticci Toby opted to ditch the big event and set fire to a deli owned and staffed by the cult his family raised him in.

Jeff the Serial Killer wandered past, pausing only to light a cigarette from the burning facade on his erratic way towards Merston High.

Remembering the ten-hour work shifts and beatings Ticci Toby received for being Ticci Toby when they weren't locking him in the nearest closet, Ticci Toby watched the flames spread from the old, dry wooden deli to the equally old, dry wooden vape shop next door.

Satisfied that it would take the local fire department a long, inconvenient time to extinguish the now roaring blaze, Ticci Toby then followed a group of middle-school aged boys into a nearby patch of woods.

What he did there was extremely gratifying, involved axes, and has a lot of bearing on what happens in the next few chapters.


	35. Bab Yaga

_Mike's Maze, once more at loose ends, found something interesting in its lonely neglect._

 _Somewhere._

 _Everywhere._

 _Nowhere._

 _It cautiously approached the other Maze out of curiosity._

 _Only to be sucked in so that like two soap bubbles, the larger adding the mass of the smaller to itself, the larger, older, no ANCIENT, Maze started to absorb the smaller._

 _Mike's Maze struggled, pulling away._

 _Changed._

 _Not big changes._

 _Little ones._

 _Subtle ones._

 _Ones that would only be noticed if the watcher was paying attention._

 _And inside Mike's Maze, a little house on chicken legs rose clumsily upright and began pacing nervously among the dark trees of home._


	36. Dia de Muertos, Day of the Dead

_Marion County, Oregon, November 1, 201-_

 **Earlier that morning, just before sunrise.**

"Frankie honey, no questions right now, but I need you to dress like you're going on a hike. Practical. No heels, no platforms, no skirts, just jeans and a warm shirt or sweater, maybe hiking boots. _Just wear something sensible for once!"_

Frankie's mother began rummaging through the back of Frankie's closet where the less popular clothing lived before pulling out distressed jeans and a wool sweater. After tossing them to Frankie, Vivica started going through Frankie's perfectly organized shoe bin. Confused, Frankie sat up on her marble slab, leads still clipped to her neck bolts. Why was her mother trying to pull together an outfit made up of Frankie's least favorite clothes that she only kept around in case they came back in style.

They might, given Frankie's extended lifespan.

"Mom, what are you doing? Get out of my closet!"

Vivica turned and said quietly. "Shhh, keep your voice down. Your father doesn't approve of me involving you in this!"

"What?" Frankie's face crinkled in bewilderment. She stood up from her marble slab, disconnecting the charging cables from her neckbolts. What was going on here? Dad always went with whatever mom wanted to do. Why _wouldn't_ he approve of ummm, well, whatever "this" is?

Deciding not to argue, Frankie pulled on her boring but practical clothes and followed her tall mother who insisted she not wear makeup today through the kitchen and towards the attached garage, hastily applying minimal lipstick as she went. ("What, no makeup?!" Viv lost that battle, and Frankie was glad of that. You can steal a girl's fashionable outfits, but you can't get rid of her on-fleek makeup.)

Getting into the small car that Viktor had given her for their wedding anniversary, Vivica insisted Frankie made good use of her new license and do the driving while she gave directions.

"Mom, where are we going?" Frankie asked when they turned onto I-5 which eventually led to Canada.

"You'll see." Vivica smiled tightly, a beat-up old alligator skin doctor's bag on her lap.

This was how every conversation for the drive went, other than, "Don't tell anyone, ever."

Like HELL Frankie would! It was embarrassing enough wearing last year's jeans while driving your temporarily insane mom almost to CANADA!

Then there was that mysterious truck Frankie was supposed to follow. What's up with that?

Finally, after turning onto an unpaved county road that seemed to wind into the woods for for-everrrrrr and then stopping in what looked like an abandoned Girl Scout camp, Vivica's car was absolutely swarmed by what felt like hundreds of strangers.

"Mom!" Frankie nervously released the steering wheel before setting the parking brake and unconsciously taking her mother's hand. "Mom, who are these people, and why are they staring at us?" She scanned the mixture of mainstream humans and unfamiliar RADS.

"Welcome to Sanctuary, Frankie. They're just excited to see a new face – it's pretty isolated out here." Eyes closed, Vivica took a deep breath and counted to three before adding, "Frankie, I want you to meet the shadow RADs."

"Shadow… RADs?" Frankie exclaimed. "Mom, what are—" only she was interrupted when somebody outside the car hollered, "Hi-hi-hi Mrs. Stein!"

A small round face covered with bruises and topped by two horns smiled into Frankie's window. "Didja miss me?" the dark-haired little girl exclaimed, "Didja bring crayons? Dr. Seuss? Gum? Cherry Chapstick? I lost a tooth! I lost a tooth – gimme a quarter, please? The tooth fairy couldn't find me out here!" The child's voice sounded like two people talking at once as she pointed at her bare upper chest where her shabby winter coat gaped with one grubby mittened hand.

Frankie gasped, covering her mouth - too late! Hastily stepping back back in her worn pink Keds the little girl looked away crestfallen, the shark-toothed maw dominating her upper chest abruptly slamming shut as she quickly zipped her coat over her second mouth.

Embarrassed by her insensitivity, Franky fell back into the leather upholstery of the little BMW, numbly watching as the back of the truck she'd been following for half an hour was opened revealing stacks of canned goods, frozen meat, two big boxed appliances, bundles of old clothes, and some boxes marked "library discards". The crowd surrounding the car quickly abandoned staring at Frankie and quickly began unloading the truck like they'd done it before a thousand times.

Not recognizing Toby as a schoolmate because of his half-mask and goggles as he shambled past their car carrying a case of canned green beans under each arm, Frankie swallowed her shame and leaned over the steering wheel exclaiming as she watched the unloading. "Mom, what's going on? Who, who ARE these people? Why do they know you?"

"They're shadow RADs, Frankie, remember? It's time you learned about them." Vivica shifted the medical bag on her lap, smiling sadly, "Seeing as in a way, you're responsible for them being here."

 **Food Truckin'**

Short legs pumping hard, La-La scurried alongside Auntie S'Diya and her big brothers to Toby's loud stuttered yip of "Y-y-y-yEE-H-h-h-h-h-h-hawwwwww!"

Today was gonna be great!

You could tell because everyone was dressed in their best. Masks, hoodies, goggles, weapons, you name it, it was there!

Big brother BEN suddenly stopped and turned, rising over the general stampede of social outcasts to scoop up little sister Sally because she and her teddy bear, Mr. D(eath), were too slow.

La-La giggled with both mouths without breaking stride. Those two were always slow! Waving, La-La ran past Auntie S'Diya towards the pretty little silver car that came through the camp gate right behind the big supply truck.

Excited to see the nice mint-green doctor lady who would look at her cuts and bruises, La-La got up on her tippy- toes to peer into the driver's side window as soon as the car stopped, grinning to show where she'd just lost a tooth.

Only to find a different green face with mismatched eyes staring back at her with undisguised alarm.

Who was this?

Backing away while zipping up her coat to hide what made her different, La-La frowned in disappointed confusion as a girl about ClockWork's size nervously stepped out of the drivers' side of the car. Mrs. Stein came around the back of the car from the passenger's side, holding her arms out to La-La

La-La, hurt forgotten, ran forward: her favorite adult in the whole wide world had come after all!

Toby huffed and puffed his way past them in his mask and big yellow goggles along with Masky, Hoody, and Eyeless Jack, wrestling a new industrial washing machine over the rough, half-frozen ruts in the camp's neglected driveway. They stopped to catch their breaths, and waved eagerly at Mrs. Stein, (With Eyeless Jack facing the wrong direction, as usual.) before continuing to hump the bulky washer towards the big shed behind the dining hall, Laughing Jack capering along behind, the matching new industrial dryer easily balanced on his head stripy noodle arms fully extended for balance.

"Mom, what's going on?" Anxiously sidling up to Mrs. Stein the girl with mismatched eyes then asked, "And why am I responsible for all of… of…this?!" She gestured at the happy chaos swirling around her. "I don't know these people!"

"S'Diya, we're so sorry the truck didn't come on Wednesday as usual. We had engine trouble and finally got it fixed this morning – I hope this wasn't an inconvenience?" S'diya shook her head, smiling. Vivica then turned to Frankie, "Honey, we'll discuss this on the way home after we've had lunch with everyone – Eyeless Jack! Yes, you!" Vivica scolded the odd-looking teenaged boy who'd been helping move the new washing machine, "Oh no you _don't,_ young man! I saw you reach into the cooler on my back seat – there's a special lunch surprise for you in that cooler and not one second earlier!"

Vivica passed La-La to S'Diya, saying, "La-La, go with S'Diya while my daughter and I get a few special things out of the car. I'll see you at the Nurse's Cabin in when the big hand is on the twelve and the little hand is on the seven just like I drew for you last week. Can you do that for me?"

"'K." La-La nodded, thoughtfully braiding a lock of S'Diya's luxurious pink hair as S'Diya and the two green women began unloading the little car.

Daughter?

Was this the nice girl that Mrs. Stein sometimes told La-La about when changing the bandages on her bigger injuries? Maybe Mrs. Stein hadn't told her about La-La's special gift. That was why she looked so frightened when La-La smiled at her. Or maybe she WASN'T Mrs. Stein's little girl and was just somebody who sort of LOOKED like Mrs. Stein.

Hmmmmmm, interesting.

To test her theory, La-La jumped from S'Diya's two lower arms and ran to the stranger who was lugging the big Styrofoam cooler across the churned up muddy gravel towards the Dining Hall.

La-La grabbed the hem of the green girls' beautiful coat and tugged.

Smiling anxiously, the big girl stopped and knelt so that she was eye to eye with La-La, the big cooler resting beside her on the gravel. "I'm so sorry. You startled me with your—"

"Are you _really_ Mrs. Stein's little girl? La-La interrupted in chorus, hands on hips, "Cause if you ain't, you gotta lotta 'splainin' t' do young lady!"

 **The Long Ride Home**

"You know Tina Morph, the big girl? And the Sargent Twins?"

Seeing as those three were Freshmen and Frankie and her friends were Seniors about to graduate, all Frankie could say was a cautious, "Yes?"

Instead of an explanation, Vivica looked out the window at the passing now winter bare trees of November, a light snow falling around them as they followed Vlad Tepes's big delivery truck back onto the Interstate, Sanctuary behind them. "Not all RADs have been as lucky as you. As Draculaura. As Cleo. As Clawdeen, or even Melody the Siren who was raised by (please forgive my racism) "normies" who don't understand her but love her anyway and want to give her a good life."

"I don't get it." Signaling, Frankie passed a log truck.

"Remember La-La?"

"Yes, that second mouth's soooo cute! Did you know she can sing "Row Row Row Your Boat" as a duet with herself?"

"Yes. I taught her the song last week." Vivica watched the truck fade behind them in her rear view mirror. "Did you know that when La-La was brought to us last year she could barely talk?"

"What?"

"She's six – we think. Her mother kept her chained up in the basement for years after that second mouth appeared on her chest." Vivica stated dully, "La-La was filthy and covered with lice and sores – she inherited the mouth and horns from her father, who abandoned both when La-La was a baby – we THINK. We don't know much because La-La's not too clear on anything from before she was rescued."

"How could anybody do such a thing to their own child?!" Frankie pulled over to the side of the Interstate, killed the engine, and stared at her mother.

"It happens." Vivica sighed. "Before we made you, I wanted to work for Doctors Without Borders in one of those Middle Eastern refugee camps that never seem to close. Only I let your father talk me out of it. He was afraid of what might be done to me, particularly outside the United States if it was known what I really was – if you think things here can sometimes get crazy when a RAD is outed, you should see what happens to our kind in the Middle East and similar places!" Frankie's mother shuddered, face now a bilious olive, "That YouTube video of what was done to that poor Ghoul family last year still gives me nightmares! So, I compromised and volunteered once a week at the Salem battered women's shelter."

"I didn't know that!"

"Let's just say La-La's situation is nothing new– do you know Ticci Toby?"

"Ew!"

"Frankie, _be kind!"_

"But he's nasty!"

"Most of that he can't help. Your father and I think that he had a RAD ancestor about two generations back –WHAT, we have no idea, but most of the more "visible" traits were bred out by the time Toby was born. His family was very religious; his inherited quirks didn't make life easy for him in that environment. The same for Brian and Tim, those two big young men with the ugly truck you sometimes see around town subcontracting for Clawdeen's family. They can pass, but both have certain mental "differences" that were mistaken for early onset schizophrenia. They were both institutionalized before they were ten. It shows."

"Oh."

"Your father thinks Jackson the young man whose great grandfather was Jekyll and Hyde and Tim share common ancestry – Hyde really got around, IF you catch my drift." Frankie's mother shook her head in disgust before continuing: "Only Tim's family didn't know what to do with him once he started showing both faces – he's lucky he wasn't locked away in an attic at age ten out of shame like a lot of them were before psychiatric drugs became common." Vivica added wryly "NOT that the drugs we've tried so far work on him or Brian for that matter. Totally different brain chemistry!"

"And the camp? Sanctuary?"

"Sanctuary is Draculaura's father's idea. When it became obvious that RADS could live somewhat openly in Salem, RADs we didn't even know existed poured in after you outed yourself and your friends."

"So, SO not sorry, mom."

Mother and daughter stared each other down before breaking eye contact with a shared nervous laugh.

Vivica continued, "No. You're not. Anyway, this sudden influx of new RADS makes us old-timers nervous. What if something they do causes our friends, neighbors, and colleagues to turn against us like it's happened before in the past? We can't risk it: shadow RADs are the RADS who give the rest of us a bad name – they come alongside RADs who are fairly harmless and eager to fit in. Now all newcomers go through three month's observation at the Camp until we who were here first vote to let them join the community or not – something you're now old enough to participate in. The Morphs, the Rosenbergers, and the Sargents are lucky. They got voted in. The ones who don't, either stay here like La-La and Tobias because they have nowhere else to go or try to find another place that will take them in. Then there's… Jeff."

"Who?"

"Remember the young man in the white hoodie sitting across from you in the dining hall eating Spaghetti-O's today? That's Jeff!"

"Dude! How will I ever forget _that?_ " Frankie made a face. Pasta, chunks of meatball, and sauce, EVERYWHERE! Worse, he obviously enjoyed grossing her out— not cool!

 _"Be kind. Jeff can't help it!"_ Vivica said sharply. "But I agree. Jeff's table manners need work. Even Eyeless Jack left the table once Jeff started eating, and I don't blame him one bit!"

"Yo, MOM, be kind!" Frankie teased.

"Touche sweetie! Your dad, who doesn't want me working with the shadow RADS because he thinks they're dangerous, tried to fix Jeff's poor face when he first showed up. Even if the grafts had taken, Jeff is best kept in the Camp until we get his medications right. Let's just say he has an amazing metabolism."

"And the Schmidts? They seem so ordinary. Were they ever at the camp?"

"No. They came badly injured to our house one rainy night while you were having a sleepover at Cleo's. It was decided they stay with us until a decision about them can be made."

Digesting this, Frankie restarted her mother's sleek little car and prepared to pull back onto the Interstate.

"And?" she said looking left and right.

"They're on extended probation. Mike and his wife are amazingly stable, considering what they've been through, but I think Mike works too hard. He'll destroy the body we've somehow cobbled together for him at the rate he's going. The two girls? I just wish you and your friends would be nicer to them – it might help them fit in better!"

"Mooooommmm, it's not like me and m'boos have tried! Maggie's a thief, and Puck's the Biyach of the Century for no good reason!" Frankie groused as she merged back into traffic.

"You don't know their entire story. Give them time. If you do, perhaps you'll learn why they are the way they are."

Ten minutes later as they pulled into the Stein's driveway, snow now dusting the immaculate lawn, Frankie stopped the car. "Mom, if you're going to Sanctuary next week, I want to come with you. And I want to bring my friends. They need to see this."

Vivica smiled, "I hoped you'd say that."

 **Dinnertime Entertainment**

It started during the first dinner in nearly a week that wasn't boxed macaroni and cheese and PB minus the J washed down with red drink.

It had been quiet enough to hear a fly fart, and other than chewing, the silence could easily be pierced by something that quiet when Brian, who liked stirring things up, called out: "…Sing a song, Toby sing a song!"

 _S'Diya, who stood holding four big serving spoons behind the big steam table, sighed with relief. Things were going to be all right after all: the dinnertime ritual of humiliating someone in front of the entire camp was back._

Soon the entire lodge was filled with an entire chorus of outcasts and crazies singing the simple tune while making as much noise as they could between lines.

"We won't shut up 'til you stand up, (slam, slam) Sing a song Toby! Sing a song!"

Toby stood up, head violently jerking to the right, brain totally blank on songs. He twitched and stumbled mentally and physically until a thin, evil smile stretched across his face and he added his bit to the nightly dinner ritual: "Sing a song Tim and Brian! Sing a song! (clap, clap) Sing a song Brian and Tim! Sing a song!"

 _S'Diya relaxed further. If Toby, her emotional barometer, was going along with things without protest, the tensions building the last few days because the supply truck was late were beginning to ebb, the squabbles and petty grudges that flared up all over Sanctuary would ease. She glanced up into the exposed rafters of the old CCC era building at where Bading-Tish! crouched, ready to intervene if things got out of hand. Bading-Tish! gave a brisk nod behind her blank silver breathing mask and shimmered out of sight. A quick ripple through across the dining hall's floor in among the tables towards the door indicated that the big Predator maiden was leaving._

 _S'Diya's fellow guard had relaxed enough to patrol the outer boundaries of Sanctuary for the first time since last Thursday._

 _Another good sign._

To the thunder of the entire camp's delight, the two good ol'boys paused in their shoveling, stood up, and sang in deep baritones for BEN to get up and sing a song before sitting back down to pound down more cheeseburger casserole and green beans.

BEN then passed it on to Lost Silver, who after awkwardly jumping to float next to BEN mid-air without limbs, passed it 'round the big room to the family tables and from there to Sally and La-La until E.J. had his turn.

"Well, I guess this one goes to someone we all know," He took a deep breath, obviously holding in a giggle. "She runs this nuthouse and makes us get up off our asses, so I guess…" His jagged grin spread as he tried singing breathily with a straight face, black tongue flickering. "Sing a song S'Diya, sing a song!"

The room filled with laughter and the loud bang of hands, tableware, and other assorted things joined the communal demand for a final round.

 _Blushing and bashful, S'Diya put down her serving spoons, glancing out the nearest window. The pale, featureless face that hovered there in the early darkness of a snowy November evening nodded soundlessly and vanished._

 _Whew!_

"Guess it was a good idea to be in middle-school glee club after all!" She quipped still in her apron as she took a deep breath before launching into _Jeepers Creepers'_ at the top of her impressive lungs, trotting around the room, grabbing other people to dance, all joining in. Finally, she took a bow, squeezed E.J. as hard as she could with all her arms, and sat back down panting.

 _Yes, they had passed the latest crisis point. Things would be all right._

 _Until the next crisis._


	37. In the Beginning

_Marion County, Oregon, November 2, 201-_

 **The Angel of Humility**

In the beginning, when everything was so new it was all bleeding edge, there once was an angel, a General of Heaven, #2 of Seven, so humble, that it was proud of its humility.

Genderless, as humility knows no gender, it one day while being humble about its humility to the point of pride, tripped over the hem of its own immaculate robe…

…and plummeted headfirst from Heaven, wherever Heaven may be, seeing as Heaven has no fixed address.

Screaming in terror, all four pairs of wings flapping frantically to break its fall, the Angel of Humility, struggled downward through the air for eternity, wings totally useless.

Until it face-planted in the dead center of Creation the second day after Creation had been signed off on.

And shattered.

Like a mirror.

Into four selves.

What staggered badly concussed from the impact crater, wings once strong with humility now writhing in blackened tentacle-like shreds from four separate backs, attempted to re-enter Heaven.

Only to be firmly excluded: they didn't have the correct I.D.

The Angel of Humility was one being.

NOT four.

Obviously, they had stolen the I.D.

What did they think the gatekeeper of Heaven was, stupid? "Off with you!"

(This was before St. Peter. Perhaps it was Gabriel, who was an officious prick no matter what the situation.)

All four Angels of Humility submitted an appeal.

Which was filed.

And then lost.

And then recovered.

It seems Gabriel had been in error, not that he would ever admit it.

It was indeed, the Angel of Humility knocking at the gate, all four of it.

Problem was, there was only one slot available for Humility.

Not four.

Humility found itself being transferred to the bureaucracy of Hell on indefinite mental health leave until it could pull itself together.

Hell, a distorted reflection of Heaven, had its own bureaucracy. There was an open position for a Demon of Pride.

Hell being Hell, didn't mind diversity.

In fact, Hell encouraged it, "The more, the merrier!"

(This was when "job sharing" was invented, btw.)

So, as with the position of the Angel of Love which had been vacated around the time Eve discovered apples, the position of Angel of Humility was left open until the former Angel might somehow pull itself together – which so far hasn't happened.

Heaven, like all bureaucracies, barely noticed, grinding away under its own momentum, cherubim filling in where they could with little or no noticeable changes while the former Angel of Humility wandered the Earth as the Demon of Pride, it's four selves, Slenderman, Trenderman, Offenderman (Oy vey, whatta perv!), and last and least of all, Splendorman, feeding on as well as causing nightmares, which are, after all, little but pride laid bare for all to see.

Except for Splendor, whom we shall discuss at a later date.

 **A third nightmare interlude: The Lost Boy**

 _*There was a time, long ago, when I had no place to call home._

"Stop! Get off'a me, you dirty little _pervert!_ "

 _My only friend was the man in the moon, and he sometimes would go away too._

Surrounded by cigarette butts while starting another, Toby's pot-bellied father had been standing in the mostly empty kitchen stripped down to his wife beater and skivvies.

 _Then one night, when I closed my eyes, I saw a shadow flying high._

His mother had been a beard the whole time.

No wonder she was willing to swallow every poisoned word the Apostle poured into her ears!

 _He came to me with the sweetest smile._

The boy, the son, giggled and twitched. His father hadn't been there, not even to say good-bye to the closed coffin of his own daughter – he showed up after the fact drunk.

 _He told me he wanted to talk for a while._

Like father, like son.

Because the Apostle said so, the son admitted his sin to his father, so he could be saved from the sin. But the father who gave him the sin only threw a bottle at him.

 _He said, "Peter Pan, that's what they call me."_

The voices told the son what happened. The voices were his friends.

His only friends.

At first, he hated them, but now, he accepted them.

 _I promise that you'll never be lonely_.

His father had turned, wanting to see what was wrong.

"Should'da just stayed put, old man." The son laughed till he gasped for air as he pulled a butcher knife from a drawer after kicking his father to the floor for once the actions, his voice smoothe and decisive, all jerks and ticks and stutterings gone in a blur of ecstatic speed.

 _And ever since that day…_

"What the Hell are you doing?!" His father tried to fight, which only made his son giggle and stab harder.

 _I am a Lost Boy from Neverland, usually hanging out with Peter Pan. And when we're bored we play in the Woods, always on the run from Captain Hook._

Another well-placed punch and a good stab at the father who beat his own children and provided a willing bottom to Ronald the pimply cashier at Dollar Tree's top.

'This is what you get for doing everything you've done to me… And for not caring enough when my big sister died… and this is for every time you called me unclean, you old hypocrite!'

Each blow a show of anger. Every time his father tried to block his son or fight back was futile to someone who was numb to the whole god damn world.

 _Run, run lost boy, they say to me. Run away from all of reality. Neverland is home to Lost Boys like me. And all the Lost boys are- Neverland is home to Lost Boys like me…_

The son, no, _Boy,_ glanced back at the bloody corpse of the father, no, _Old Man,_ contemplating his crime, until he realized his audience.

"Why did you do that?!" The mother, just some lady, some beard, screaming and crying stared at him like a criminal. "Why?!"

 _He sprinkled me in pixie dust and told me to believe,_

 _Believe in him and believe in me._

 _Together we will fly away in a cloud of green, to our beautiful destiny._

The Boy ran into the garage and took the small hatchets in one bandaged hand, gasoline and matches in the other, stuffing work gloves into his striped hoodie's pocket.

 _As we soared above the town that never loved me, I realized I finally had a family._

The Boy ran across the rows of houses, tank open and spurting the noxious liquid to set this goddam hell-hole ablaze.

 _Soon enough we reached Neverland. Peacefully, my feet hit the sand. And ever since that day..._

Into the woods the Boy went as the tank emptied out and the ringing started again.

 _I am a Lost Boy from Neverland, usually hanging out with Peter Pan. And when we're bored, we play in the Woods. Always on the run from Captain Hook…_

Hatchets strung across his back, he reached into his pocket.

 _Run, run, Lost Boy, they say to me. Away from all of reality._

 _Neverland is home to Lost Boys like me_

 _And Lost Boys like me are- Neverland is home to Lost Boys like me._

The trail of fire started ripping through a neighborhood of lost, sub-urban causes somewhere in Colorado like a wall.

 _Peter Pan, Tinker Bell, Wendy Darling…_

 _Even Captain Hook you are my perfect story book. Neverland, I love you so, you are now my home sweet home. Forever a Lost Boy at last._

Shit, the controlled fire wasn't working. It had blown back, hitting the trees surrounding the development.

The Boy ran, hoping to outrun the inferno he'd made as it gobbled the trees behind him.

 _I am a Lost Boy from Neverland. Usually hanging out with Peter Pan. And when we're bored we play in the Woods. Always on the run from Captain Hook._

No more running, he was trapped like the people in the houses with pretty façades he could hear screaming over the intensifying static-y ringing in his ears. For some reason, he was utterly calm.

 _Run, run, Lost Boy, they say to me, away from all of reality._

Something was behind him. Its large white hand was on his shoulder.

 _Neverland is home to Lost Boys like me._

It whispered to him.

 _And Lost Boys like me are-_

It promised him home and safety, if the Boy would comply.

 _Neverland is home to Lost Boys like me._

The terms were easy, fun, almost. Just some of what he'd already done tonight and some training, all he had to do was be tasty and useful. It sounded... safe, nice…

The now very Lost boy turned to shake the hand and instantly was out like a light to the sounds of the sirens as his neck stung with a fresh tattoo.

 _And lost boys like me are free,,,_

 _"Lost Boy" copyright Ruth B._

 **Family Dinner**

If Slenderman standing outside the sleeping Toby's cabin window had been physically capable of burping, he would have. The dirty little proxy with even dirtier personal habits provided him with nightmares second in taste only to Brian or Tim.

Satiated, he released the hands of Trenderman and Offenderman, who released the hands of the considerably shorter Splendorman (who stood on a stack of borrowed milk crates because he was barely six feet tall to their towering former Angelic height of eight, and was only there out of humble politeness – he had brought a humble sack lunch of sincerely self-effacing dreams about butterflies, rainbows, and kittens in a re-used Wal-Mart bag).

Toby was problematical.

Slenderman enjoyed the twitching and random swearing.

It was amusing.

As was the bedwetting.

But Toby's hobby of randomly setting inconvenient fires at inconvenient times?

Infuriating!

Toby's latest act of creative arson had resulted in Slenderman's entire mansion burning to the ground, forcing the quarter of an Angel to temporarily relocate his tasty stable of monsters to Tepes's refugee camp until the place could be rebuilt.

Tepes owed Slenderman favors.

Tepes.

Reluctantly

Complied.

The four quarters of what had once been the Angel of Humility politely shook hands with itself before folding themselves into their own share of their Maze, and vanished in a swirl of early November snow.

An empty Wal-Mart bag was later seen blowing across the snow-dusted grass around Sanctuary's empty flagpole a few hours after sunrise.

La-La hid the lovely new 96 count pack of Crayola Crayons and _Spongebob Squarepants_ coloring book that Mrs. Stein gave her for her birthday in it.

Because Jeff the Serial Killer loved eating Crayons.

Starting with the red ones.


	38. A Just So Story

_Salem, Oregon, November 201-, sometime after midnight._

 **A long time ago in a galaxy far, far— aww, who am I kiddin'?!**

 _Once upon a time, on the edge of a galaxy that could have been ours, or someone else's for that matter, a technologically superior race decided to enslave a technologically inferior race._

 _Because they didn't feel like picking their own fruit, harvesting their own grain, or butchering their own meat._

 _Menial labor was beneath them._

 _They had better, more uplifting things to do._

 _So, they chose the Yautja - because the Yautja had no obvious technology outside of a few stone knives, a woven basket or two, and possibly the usage of fire._

 _And a language that sounded like somebody flushing rocks down a toilet while banging on the wall with a handful of sticks._

 _The Yautja had no buildings outside of a few skin tents in their endless migrations from oasis to oasis across the brutally dry face of their home world. Which, if the fossil record was any indication, had once been completely covered one large warm, shallow sea._

 _They also traveled in all male groups or female and juvenile groups, had no written language, and little or no concept of numbers beyond 1-2-3-4-5-6-7-8-9-10-many!_

 _And entire groups were easily lured into the transports with promises of water, trinkets, and brightly colored cloth. A few beatings, some strategic electrical shocks and an execution or two, and their new slaves would fall in line._

 _Or so they thought._

 _Pleased, the more advanced race stripped the Yautja homeworld of most of its people, and headed into deep space on their automated route along the outer rim of their home galaxy, acquiring food and raw materials for their burgeoning inner system colonies along the way._

 _However, when choosing a slave race, the builders of the immense convoy didn't take biology into account._

 _Yautja biology, to be precise._

 _After the initial panic on the part of their new workforce, the females began calmly gathering up the juveniles instead of doing what they were told._

 _This didn't concern their new owners. Yautja were primitives._

 _A few jolts would break that up in no time._

 _And things would get going, what with the hundreds, no thousands, of new hands put to work expanding production._

 _The males, brainless, easily-fooled creatures, began milling around, their stench increasing by the second._

 _Again, no problem: a few beatings, a decapitation or six, a little voltage applied to various tender bits, and everybody would get back to work._

 _That was when the females, who were even larger than the males, formed a living shield around the juveniles. Seconds later the adult males went on an unscheduled rampage, killing every last one of their new masters even as the females fended them off with equal violence._

 _You see, there had been a reason for having separate gender groups: large numbers of Yautja males when upset or angered give off pheromones._

 _Lots of pheromones._

 _Which makes them violent._

 _And dangerous around children._

 _Which was why Yautja females kept Yautja males once they hit puberty, constantly hunting for meat or attacking the males of rival clans – waaaaaaaay out in the surrounding desert where they wouldn't bother anyone._

 _Their new masters didn't think to ask about this. After all, Yautja were ignorant savages and therefore not worth talking to, just ordering around. Due to this oversight, they quickly found themselves very, very dead; leaving the Yautja in possession of an entire automated space convoy._

 _With no idea of how anything worked._

 _Or of even how to get home. All the new owners knew once the females, the Maidens and Matrons, herded the males or Bucks into landing crafts and away from the pups, was that if you pushed this button you got one destination, and if you pushed that button, you got another._

 _In other words, it was a great way to keep the Bucks out from underfoot and productive as long as you kept a few select ones around for breeding should something go horribly wrong._

 _Despite having made an unexpected technological leap of several thousand years in a matter of hours, the now spaceborne Yautja continued their traditional nomadic lifestyle on a pre-programmed course slowly circling the outer rim of their galaxy, picking up supplies at pre-programmed stops, sending out hunting/war parties, drying food and hides on the heat baffles of engines that might as well have been the hearts of suns, and raising their pups the way they always had._

 _And continued to do so long after the empire that attempted to enslave them collapsed, taking its people with it._

Maybe this half-forgotten history was why Sargent was pacing around her Bower, unsuccessfully trying not to smash things.


	39. Blue Sunday

_Salem, Oregon, November, Sunday, 201-_

 **Zzzzrrrrrrraaaaaapppp!**

There was a burst of static, followed by an electronic squeal.

The iPhone on Puck's dresser began to rock, shifting closer and closer to the edge.

A spark.

Another squeal.

The iPhone teetered in among the books, doodles, and free sample lipsticks, and then...

It.

Tipped.

Over.

...and landed on the tiled floor with a clatter.

BEN Drowned exited the little device, to hover sparking in the middle of the darkened room in the early silence of a snowy morning before sunrise.

Holy shit, but this new technology was a bitch to navigate!

 **Splat!**

Fredator poked his head out from under the basking blanket where he and Tedator had been camping out in the heart of the rhododendron tangle at the back of the Stein's property for the last 30-day or so and did a double-take, mandibles rattling quizzically.

Something had happened in the night.

Something… _wonderful._

Snow.

He knew about snow. Back in the jungles of Columbia, he'd seen pictures and watched vids of the stuff on the console in the remains of their mother's ship.

He just never actually expected to experience it first-hand.

Propping himself up on his elbows, hot blanket draped around his shoulders, Fredator poked at it.

It was cold.

And… exciting.

He scooped some up.

It easily compacted in a fist-sized lump.

Fredator gave a loud hooting rattle. Tedator, still asleep, sat bolt upright with a rattle of alarm which roughly translated to, "What? What?"

Only to get a snowball right in the mandibles.

Seconds later, the rhododendron tangle violently began shuddering and shaking as a full-blown no prisoners snowball fight erupted in its heart.

 **Tattoo You**

"…since when can this family afford a video game console? That shit's expensive!" Puck grumbled as she groggily powered up before climbing down from the top bunk in the room she once shared with Maggie and now shared with Mickey until her aunt and uncle could figure out where to put this latest, kinda large, unexpected addition to their patchwork family.

Rubbing her eyes, Puck stepped over the bright yellow sneakers and the blue track suit borrowed from Aunt Raina for Mickey to wear until they could get to the Goodwill for real boy clothes this today and froze.

O.

M.

G.

BEN Drowned was sitting next to her little, well, not so little, cousin-uncle-little brother-whatEVER, on the floor in front of an honest to God old school t.v., a t.v. that took up half the floor of the little bedroom and was anything but flat hooked up to a gaming system so old it might have been stolen from Fred Flintstone playing a Mario game with visible pixels.

"Yo." BEN said, followed by, "Hey!" and then, "OwOwOwOw-QUIT!". Puck, ears flattened and tail puffed, grabbed the ghost boy by one pointy ear and dragged him out in the hall like one of those cartoon helium balloons you see for sale at Wal-Mart.

"Wha?" Mickey said around a juice box, ears perking up. He rose in a shower of empty cookie boxes and crumbs, trying to follow them.

Puck snarled, caught herself, and softened her voice, "Mickey, keep the game going. Me and Boo-Boy here got somethin' private to discuss!"

"Oh." Mickey's velvety blue rabbit ears drooped, thumb creeping up towards his mouth. "Wanna play with us when you're done? It's MARIO!"

"We'll play once we're done!" Mickey's ears perked up and the thumb went back to the game controller as Puck tried not to slam the bedroom door shut behind her and wake up the whole house.

Some things needed to be private, and privacy was almost impossible in the Stein's tiny guest house.

What followed in the darkened hall (Why didn't the switch work and was that broken glass crunching underfoot? Good thing Puck was wearing flip flops!) could best be described as a lot of rapid gesticulations accompanied by whispered yelling along the line of: "How the Hell did you get in here? Don't! You! Know! Bustin'! Into! A! Cop's! House! At! Oh-Dark-THIRTY! Is! A! Good! Way! To! GET YOUR FUCKIN' ASS SHOT?" she whisper-shouted up at the gently bobbing ghost boy overhead.

"So? I'm already dead!" BEN replied with a shrug, drifting around the remains of the hall light fixture, adding somewhere in among Puck's hissing splutters of disbelief that he got bored last night at the video arcade, so he'd hitched a ride to her house in her iPhone -and DUDE! Good thing she got more than two bars at her house 'cause this new Bluetooth shit's a BITCH!

And sorry about the hall light – he and her little brother Mickey broke the light in the hall playing football with a sofa cushion (How come that kid don't have no REAL toys?) so they decided it would be safer if they set up the old Nintendo 64 and t.v. they found in the attic along with a big stack of games, that, and: "BTW, you're out of Thin Mints and Lemonades – we ate up all the ones we found hidden in your Uncle Mike's toolbox under the kitchen sink."

Puck flat out HISSED when BEN happily added that before Mickey woke up, he'd learned that a.) her Uncle Mike snores like a buzz saw, and that b.) her Aunt Raina spent most of the night swatting him to make him stop which was like, a MAJOR waste of time and best of all, c.) did Puck know that her twin sister Maggie's butt looked like a potato, all lumpy and bumpy?

Oh, and d.) "Cool tattoo!"

"Tattoo? What tattoo?"

BEN gestured, causing his entire body to yaw midair, "Inside your right wrist - IT'S AWESOME!" He drifted head downwards so that they were now nose to nose.

Pushing up the right sleeve of her pajamas, Puck searched for the unwanted tattoo but couldn't see a thing in the near darkness despite her cat's eyes.

"How come there's a big ol' sign on the back of your front door that says, "Are you wearing pants?" Maybe you could look at it in the bathroom, the tattoo, I mean. Not the sign." BEN asked helpfully. "We didn't play football in there so the lights still work." Followed by "Aoooooowwwwwwwwwwwww, not the ear again!" as Puck angrily grabbed one of his ears and towed him into the bathroom after her.

She flipped on the bathroom lights right beside where Uncle Mike had spent most of the night painting where he'd repaired the wall earlier after he got home from some trailer park where some asshole in a wifebeater shanked his old lady with a steak knife in front of her kid over burnt macaroni and cheese out of a box. Can you believe it? Two o'clock in the morning and her uncle was in the bathroom stinking up the house with blue paint, RUDE!

Oh shit.

BEN wasn't jerking her around, she really did have a tattoo.

On her right wrist.

Where everybody could see it.

A cross in a circle, like a gun sight.

Where the Hell did she get it?

Why the Hell didn't she remember getting it.

She was barely fifteen.

Uncle Mike and Aunt would be soooooo pissed.

 **Blue Dawn Thoughts**

On half-power, Raina lay comfortably entwined with a snoring Mike on the big futon that dominated the living room floor of the Stein's guesthouse, the two of them basking beneath the big UV lamp once she'd got him to put the paint brush down last night and come to bed.

It didn't take Sherlock Holmes to realize that being one of the first responders at last night's trailer park stabbing had upset Mike.

Badly.

Still in his uniform, he'd got out the paint and brush, mumbling about the smell of blood, and how good it had smelled, how he'd liked it, how he'd wanted to tear the son-of-a-bitch that'd gutted his girlfriend in front of her little girl over a dropped bowl of burnt macaroni and cheese's arm off and beat him to death with the messy end, the same son-of-a-bitch who'd stood there grinning and handcuffed in a meth daze beside the poor woman's body while the kid was being coaxed out from under the bed by Officer Sargent, the same son-of-a-bitch who Mike was no better than… that he, Mike, had no business being a cop… he was no better…

It had taken Raina three hours and two coats of pale sky-blue paint to talk Mike down, into the shower, and to bed, with her highly aware of the twins and Mickey's silent, alert presences behind the closed doors of their bedrooms…

…frankly, Mike, in realtor's terms, was a "fixer upper"; something she'd figured out near the beginning of their relationship – which started with him giving her a ticket for tail-ending a truck with her dad's old Harley-Davidson because she'd been too busy staring at him as he directed early morning Base traffic to pay attention to what was in front of her, and almost ended with him disappearing from her life for the first time after she'd introduced him to her father a few weeks into the relationship.

Unusually upset, Raina called her _babcias_ , her Polish grannies, trying to figure out what she'd done wrong. They'd been going at it hot and heavy and then… not so much as a phone call or a "Don't let the screen door hit you on the ass on your way out, you damm diesel dyke!".

Her babcias, former involuntary staffers in a German SS brothel within sight of the Warsaw Ghetto, held no illusions about men, reminded Raina in Polish that she was a career Navy helicopter pilot who'd survived growing up with six roughneck older brothers and the daughter of a Top Gun flight instructor, before adding, "Życie jest twardy!"

In other words: "Life is hard. Suck it up, buttercup!"

Ehhhhhhh, howeverrrrrrr… this "Mike", this _chłopiec,_ sounded like that nasty run-down house all full of crack dealers down the street from their duplex – a fixer upper if Raina wanted to put in the extra work… no? But only if she could stand being around the big _makieta,_ the big dummy, for more than fifteen minutes at a time… Instead of whining to them and throwing away perfectly good money on a pay phone, she'd better be demanding answers from him, _right now._

Expected harsh blessing received, Raina tracked Mike down to where he was once again directing traffic out behind the Naval Station's main airstrip.

Target spotted, Raina deliberately shot past him on her dad's vintage Harley Davidson when it wasn't her turn.

Ears flaming, Mike gave a pulled-over Raina a ticket without exactly looking at her.

In return, Raina handed him a note that said, "If I mean anything to you, you're taking me to Olive Garden tonight at 18:00 hours for your birthday, you big jerk!"

Note in hand, 2nd Lt. Schmidt, USMC cop marched stiffly back to his assigned cruiser, looking neither right nor left, folded himself into the vehicle, buckled up, and drove away.

But he showed up.

At her door.

In the dorms.

Precisely at 18:00 hours.

Nervously wearing the new blue and white-striped shirt she'd left in his mailbox and reeking of Old Spice.

Over "all you can eat breadsticks and pasta", a fidgety Mike reluctantly admitted with his usual clipped economy of words that he'd never really had a girlfriend before and that he'd panicked once he realized that her dad was a hot shot Top Gun flight instructor and highly decorated combat veteran – a nobody like him had no business messing with such high caliber ammo.

So he'd fled the scene of the crime with his tail between his legs.

Having watched Mike lumber into the heavyweight boxing ring with aggressive enthusiasm and take out several opponents in a row before being flattened himself at a recent local tournament, a stunned Raina gave him a "deer in the headlights" look.

Then, as if a floodgate had opened, Mike after a moment's further red-faced fumbling, asked, "Are these here breadsticks REALLY all you can eat? Gimme that there menu - I don't want no hidden charges… Dayum! I mean, WOW! They really are! Pass me that there basket. I didn't know Eye-talian food was this good. Had I known that, I'dda took shore leave when m' last carrier dropped anchor in Naples Bay!"

Realizing he'd just accidentally outed himself as a gen-yew-ine Cracker, Mike sat there, eyes averted, ears crimson, sweat suddenly darkening the pits and collar of his new shirt.

Raina, frequently reprimanded for swearing at people who pissed her off in a mixture of Korean, Japanese, Polish and German with a Berlin accent, passed him the breadsticks without comment.

And it had ended a few months later in a bus accident in Germany, and him with a medical discharge… and a lot of strange water under even stranger bridges.

Raina sighed in the purpleish glow of the grow lamp overhead, reached for her iPhone, and called in sick for her husband.

Domino's and Wal-Mart would just have to do without him today.

 **Rebellion**

CRASH!

Patador Sargent hadn't seen Sargent this cranky and limp in the mandibles since the two of them 110 solar cycles ago found themselves stranded after the small landing craft they and six other Matrons and Maidens along with their spear carriers were traveling in blew apart over a desolate half-frozen but miserably wet land he now knew to call Siberia.

Their lifepod was the only one to deploy seconds before the massive fireball that had been their landing craft flattened thousands and thousands of acres of taiga as he watched in the escape craft's rear screen.

What didn't topple, remained lifelessly standing, the charred carcasses of what he now knew to call reindeer scattered among them.

The little craft that saved them fell apart upon landing in the southern continent of the western hemisphere.

For the highly social Superior Maiden who eventually became Sargent's mate, being stranded had been a nightmare.

Scheduled for routine castration, being stranded in the Columbian jungle was NOT exactly a disaster for Mr. Sargent because the isolation from their clan allowed the very bottom of the pecking order to display an ingenuity even he didn't realize he had.

Using that ingenuity, he'd courted and won Sargent.

It had taken fifty very, very long cycles.

He knew he'd finally succeeded one afternoon when she peremptorily rattled her mandibles at him after he'd built his best trap yet, ordering him to kneel.

Using one of the few unbroken eating basins left to them filled with the traditional harsh-smelling concoction used to in the coming of age ceremony, she'd painfully forced his lank, wiry hair into the locks of an adult.

Locks Mr. Sargent never dreamed he'd ever have.

Bading T'ish was born two cycles later.

Which cheered Sargent up considerably.

Fredator and Tedator were born by the time he'd taught himself to fix what was left of the onboard communications system,

Twins.

Extremely rare, extremely lucky, and _he'd fathered them._

Sargent was ecstatic.

Ruby came later.

A second Maiden! (Patador's ecstasy knew no bounds.)

By then, the young Bucks had taught themselves and then Ruby to speak _ooman_ from watching the video monitor he'd managed to make work again.

Now they and Ruby wanted to see the world.

Loudly.

Bored with and tired of his spawn's noise, Patador submissively approached Sargent: it was time to find new hunting grounds. How about we go North?

Sargent rattled, whistled, and then agreed. There was nothing left for them here. Time to break camp – they needed new challenges.

They'd been among _oomans_ for two solar cycles now, which was interesting. But Sargent was once again limp in the mandibles - when she wasn't raging around her Bower, breaking things because last night she had witnessed the unthinkable: a Matron who'd allowed a Dangerous, Inferior Buck near her pup, and paid the ultimate price.

CRASH! (There went another blown glass eating basin, one he'd been really proud of.)

As was her traditional right as a Senior Matron, Sargent claimed the pup, Marlys, who now lay at the back of the Bower, curled up with Ruby in the pink Hello Kitty bed he'd built her.

"HOW COULD MARLYS'S MATRON BE SO IRRESPONSIBLE?" CRASH! "EVERYBODY KNOWS YOU NEVER LET ANYONE DANGEROUS NEAR YOUR PUPS! PUPS BEFORE BUCKS!" CRASH!

Mandibles reflexively clamping over his eyes as yet another blown glass eating basin bit the dust, Patador sprayed himself down with _ooman_ deodorant so that his anxious pheromones wouldn't trigger his mate further. Tossing aside the empty can of AXE, the squat little _Yautja_ reluctantly pulled an old sheet over the big loom he'd just finished warping and risking grievous bodily harm, approached his mate who outweighed him by more than 100 pounds with a distracting proposal.

Breaking hundreds if not thousands of solar cycles's worth of tradition, teaching himself the forbidden skill of weaving, would have to wait.

It was time to finish the Festival of the Redistribution of Wealth.

However, on the way out the door to complete the ritual, Patador grabbed his knitting bag.

Why not start the revolution with a pair of brightly colored comfy, hand-knit socks?


	40. Blue Sunday II

_Salem, Oregon, November, Sunday, 201-_

 **Legalese.**

Slendy stood on the roof of the Stein's guest house, the remnants of his wings stiffly twitching with petty satisfaction, falling snow lightly dusting his immaculately tailored suit as the huge thing that only resembled a raven from a safe distance flapped into the darkness towards the Cascades.

In the realm of the Fallen, as in the realm of those who have yet to Fall, Law was everything.

And as far as the former Angel of Humility was concerned, the former Angel of Love had His head up His prissy British ass.

Slendy cared not one whit if the former Angel of Love had what he claimed was title to the souls that existed beneath Slendy's feet

But this was the Mortal realm.

The only paperwork that mattered was the paperwork of the non-Mortal realm.

As in "Heaven" and "Hell".

The title had been generated and signed in the Mortal realm.

Making the girl fair game, and therefore, His.

So what if the entire family she belonged to (a bizarre mess of machines and third generation Nephilim who'd forgotten what they were) allegedly belonged to Sebastian's current Master?

It was Mortal paper. Ha!

With relish, Slendy put His mark on her, claiming her as His own.

As was His right.

To Hell with Sebastian and his absurd basket-case master.

 **Sunday Sleep-In**

Toby rolled over on his lumpy, squeaky camp cot.

Despite the non-stop all-night yammering of his roommates Mr. Widemouth, , and Stripy Clown Asshole (aka "Laughing Jack"), this was one of the best night's sleeps he'd had in a long time since after wetting the bed he'd burned down Slenderman's fancy-schmancy mansion because SOMEBODY didn't bother to clean the filter on the dryer in the communal laundry room 99 loads too many after he'd washed his sheets for the 98th time.

Though obviously not Toby's fault, the resulting electrical fire, had been… heh-heh-heh … _grrrrrrratifying._

Anyway, sleeping that night along with the other bitching, grumbling Proxies in the toolshed behind the smoldering remains of the mansion had been almost as satisfying as last night.

Orders from Slenderman or not, Toby was gonna have to exercise his two best friends more often.

Stomach rumbling, Toby stepped over the sprawled-out figures of his two roomates, pulling on whatever clothing he encountered in the dark.

He peered through a tear in the crumbling blackout curtains.

The dining hall was closed.

No prob.

Toby folded a corner of his Master's Maze around him so that the bachelor squalor of his surroundings faded away.

He could always fend for himself.

 **Snow Plow**

Scraaaaape. Flomp.

Scraaaaape. Flomp.

Scraaaaape. Flomp.

Mike paused in mid-shovel to pull the watch cap down more firmly over his ears, deliberately dropping the illusion most people saw when they looked at him so that instead of a late thirtysomething heading into his forties who'd taken care of himself, they saw something… Not. Quite. Right.

The Steins had been kind.

Very kind.

But there was only so much that they could do with his body. A cut here. A cut there, a welding job, a patch job, cutting around the sigils and runes that trapped his spirit within the animatronic shell it'd occupied almost three decades since he'd taken a night watchman's job out of desperation at _Fazbear's Pizzaria._

 _Only to die_ a big fat failure the first night.

A big, fat failure who'd earlier dropped his guard one time too many and found himself watching his career as a Marine and a cop go down the drain so fast it'd given him whiplash.

Mike resumed his grip on the old, battered snow shovel.

Scraaaaape. Flomp.

Scraaaaape. Flomp.

Scraaaaape. Flomp.

But not this time.

The Steins, whose long winding driveway he was shoveling by hand, had fixed his deteriorating joints, which he was grateful for, calling in that weird Igor kid who had an unnatural understanding on how things like Mike, like Raina, like the girls, worked.

They retooled his power source, so as long as he had access to ultraviolet light: the new skin they'd stretched over his patchwork body – as long as he didn't damage it.

Raina and the girls had worked out better, so much better.

Mike gave an involuntary grin. The women in his so-called life deserved to be pretty. What _he_ looked like didn't matter, as long as it got the job done.

Scraaaaape. Flomp.

Scraaaaape. Flomp.

Scraaaaape. Flomp.

The "girls" were his responsibility.

They were his fault.

He _owed_ them.

Big time.

So he'd take any job he could get outside of his official job as Merston High's SRO. Stocking shelves after midnight at Wal-Mart, delivering pizzas for Domino's— hell, even small, unskilled jobs for the Wolf family's contracting business.

Mr. Wolf wanted Mike to quit the cop biz and work full time for him – even offering to get him Union membership and help pay for the training for him to become an electrician or plumber – even a carpenter or a bricklayer if it came to that.

Mike's current body could easily lift a Volkswagon Beetle with one hand, bricks wouldn't be an issue.

Contracting paid more than what he made as a cop, but the cop biz was steady and he already knew the work. Anyway, Mike was already up to his ass in debt to Tepes, and as for the Steins, the Steins refused to take any payment for what they'd done for Mike's little flea-market family so he'd had to settle those debts by taking care of their property any way he could.

Worse, Charlie, doubtlessly would come flying up out of nowhere when Mike least expected it like some obscene Marionette.

Charlie. Oh yeah, goddamned Charlie

Raina and Puck were sweet to give him whatever money they made after the monthly bills were paid. Even Jeremy, the bum, did his share. But would what Mike slowly accumulated in the hollow of his torso surrounding his rudimentary heart _ever_ be enough to make Charlie go away for good?

If he had to, he'd buy the girls and let Charlie have him.

If Charlie would accept the deal.

He could take anything the bitch could dish out short of her dumping them into the grinder in front of him, including her dumping him afterwards feet first just to hear him scream.

Scraaaaape. Flomp.

Scraaaaape. Flomp.

Scraaaaape. Flomp.

Perturbed, Mike looked up in the purple stormlight of dawn. The two Sargent Brothers had joined him and were clumsily mimicking his motions with shovels they'd found in the Stein's toolshed.

Oh yeah, the Sargent Brothers.

What the Hell were they up to following him around all the time?

Hell, he didn't even know WHAT those two were.

Rumor was, they were some sort of alien.

If there was such a thing.

Whatever.

Scraaaaape. Flomp.

Scraaaaape. Flomp.

Scraaaaape. Flomp.

Closer to home was the Maze.

It wasn't how Mike remembered the way it had always been when Raina tricked him into going into it last night when the smell of that trailer park Romeo's victim's blood filled his senses to the point where he was ready to go hunting to spill blood of his own…

…nose full of fresh human blood, the smell of the Maze had distracted him the second he'd entered the place that was nowhere and everywhere.

The smell was different… like somebody had cut the world's largest fart. No, not that, what was the word? Sulfurous!

And the checkerboard floor and the gritty walls… had been replaced by a meandering trail that wandered aimlessly between red silk curtains and the occasional marble wall, and the pattern of the floor was now black and white zig-zags, like huge tire tracks.

Speaking of tires, where in Hell did that big hulk of a two ton stakebed come from? It was a fine truck, if a bit rusty, but a man could do a lot with a big truck once he replaced the newspaper gaskets, installed a new battery, and rebuilt the stakebed.

He could haul a lot of stuff with a fine big truck like that and get paid to do it, for one.

Scraaaaape. Flomp.

Scraaaaape. Flomp.

Scraaaaape. Flomp.

The remains of the Meadow with its now crumbling toy soldiers, each wearing his barely remembered face, and the last of the ghost children he'd gathered up in his lonely insanity for company skittering through the tall grass had been there, but everything was dim, faded – not like when he'd first shown it to Raina with the Fox and the Cat dancing around their feet when she'd followed him into the Maze to drag him back into daylight and adult responsibility.

Scraaaaape. Flomp.

Still, Raina had been right to trick him into going back into the Maze.

He'd needed time alone in the Maze to get his head together… because… because…

Scraaaaape. Flomp.

Because things were not right.

Scraaaaaaa- huh?

Huge snowflakes whirling around him, Mike straightened, watching as the snow at the bottom of the Stein's driveway began to dimple. Fredator and Tedator echoed his pose, water vapor rising from their bare arms and legs and the network of wires enmeshing them, dreads swaying in the snow-filled breeze, mandibles softly clattering behind their featureless mirror-masks.

Sargent and her mate slowly came in to focus even as Mike reflexively replaced patchwork reality with the illusion of a well-preserved, athletic man somewhere in the middle of life.

The two brothers sprinted towards them, shovels abandoned, their little… ummmm, sister? racing towards them, dragging a slightly smaller child by the hand. Picking up the two smaller ones, the two brothers submissively approached the two adults majestically striding across the snow towards Mike in a cloud of steam.

As he watched, the two groups met and paused, touching and clattering at each other before resuming their march up the driveway to where he stood.

Sargent, barefoot and wearing a loud Hawaiian shirt over her black uniform trousers with what looked like a screaming purple, orange, and green tablecloth draped fetchingly over her head and shoulders stopped, politely removed her breathing mask before ceremoniously pulling out the iPad and holding it eye-level to Mike with a long drawn out hooting rattle.

"Excuse me, a moment of your time, please?" M'Binte, Sargent's interpreter then cleared her throat from the little screen, "We come to share joy and plenty, Bower to Bower, on this auspicious day." She paused, lips moving as she studied a little slip of paper she held before adding confidentially, "In other words, Mr. Schmidt, "Take me to your leader.""

 **Unemployed, again.**

Crunch.

Wearing nothing but boxers and a stained wife beater, Brian looked up at the ceiling from the rump-sprung easy chair that reeked of and too many cats he'd rescued last week from some random curb.

The water-stained cabin ceiling over where he sprawled watching youtube vines on a stolen iPad, already buckled, buckled some more in a sifting of plaster dust beforeeee… …CRASSSSSSSSHHHHH!

"Son of a bitch, that's not funny! Get offa me, dude!" Coughing, Brian shoved Tim his roommate and most of the ceiling from his lap.

Laughing hysterically Tim landed on his back on the worn plank flooring at the foot of the chair with a loud thud.

Coughing, Brian rose, mind busy, shaking ceiling and a handful of estivating wasps out of his hair. Ignoring the slo-mo stings, he absently mashed the wasps one at a time on the walls of the Camp cabin Tepes let them infest whenever Slenderman didn't need their, _ummmmmm,_ highly specialized services.

Slendy hadn't needed them for a while; judging by Tim's bored antics and creative mumbling, it was time to go on Craigslist and find themselves something freelance.

Oooooh, look at all them goodies!

Lotta stupid, rich people 'round this time of year. Stupid rich people who got bored with their pretentious homes. Stupid rich people who would invite Brian and Tim into their homes to say, remodel the bathroom that Brian and Tim had remodeled say, two months before even as they pilfered any pills they found lying around when they weren't raiding the liquor cabinets and the fridge because _Brian and Tim worked CHEAP._

Avoiding chunks of collapsed ceiling, Brian stepped barefoot over the laughing Tim (who had slowly writhing wasps in his beard), buffing the screen of the iPad on his stained wife beater. Cool. Some McMansion dwellers wanted some work done, as in "basic demolition shit".

Noooooooooo _problemmmmmmmmm!_

Better yet, the address was familiar.

Brian and Tim's future victims were sitting ducks: they owned a lotta expensive shit and took a lotta interesting pills – and the fatass bitchy lawyer wife was always too busy tellin' everybody what to do to notice what Brian and Tim really did.

Cool.

Brian grinned as he compared listed number to the one stored on his iPhone. Yeah, he was right – _those_ people. Easy marks. Time to get the truck out of the Maze where they'd abandoned it halfway crashed through one of Slendy's walls and "borrow" some power tools.

 **Oh shit! Oh shit!**

Foundation didn't cover it.

Not even the good stuff.

Puck knew this because she emptied an entire bottle of Maggie's favorite before giving up.

And everything Uncle Mike taught her all about confusing the eyes of anybody looking directly at her, didn't work either.

Shit!

And it wasn't even a COOL tattoo, just a dumb "x" overlapping an even dumber "o". Why couldn't it be a fuckin' mermaid eating donuts or a fat shirtless dude in plaid Bermuda shorts pushing a lawn mower?

Sigh… shit!

She'd have to wear long-sleeved shirts from now on; or that bracelet set that Tina made for her a few weeks ago for her birthday – anything to break up the outline of the unwanted tattoo.

Shit! Shit!

At least Mickey hadn't seen it. That kid saw EVERYTHING!

(And BEN had better keep his big mouth shut!)

Speaking of BEN, ghost or not, she'd have to sneak him out of the house … Uncle Mike and Aunt Raina were pretty cool about most stuff, but BEN might be different… why risk it?

Puck paused mid-panic yank on her pajama sleeve, sniffing. Was that waffles?

Shit-shit-double shit! Aunt Raina was up early cooking the big family breakfast she made every Sunday morning!

Puck was gonna have to brazen this one out – with BEN out from underfoot, they might not notice her unauthorized, underage body art. She flung open the bathroom door and stepped into the hall.

BEN Drowned was lazily circling the broken light fixture, picking his nose, absently flicking buried treasure against the ceiling with little audible splats.

Ewwwwww!

"Yo! Pu—"

"B'bye, Felicia! You and your ecto-boogers are soooooo outta here." She reached up, grabbed the seat of BEN's cargoes, and towed the yelping ghost boy towards the living room, hoping that Uncle Mike was so deeply asleep that he wouldn't notice her giving the bum's rush to an adolescent apparition. "C-YA at work tomorrow!"

After that, she'd block BEN from her iPhone.

 **Waffles**

"Like, duuuuuuude, y'know—" Fitzie's flat Shaggy-sounding voice came from beneath the little kitchen table in the cramped guest house kitchen.

"I have a name. Remember?" Raina poured batter into the Belgian waffle iron she'd found in the attic last summer. She snapped the lid of the Stein's hand-me-down shut in a burst of steam before flipping the whole iron part of the device over, "Begins with "R". Ends with "A"."

"Dude, I know. It's RAINA. R.A.I.N.A." Fitzie looked hopefully up at her. If he gave her the right sad-eyed look, she might, just might, flip him a waffle before everyone else.

Better yet, a piece of bacon.

That way he wouldn't have to steal it.

Stealing required effort, something the man-dog abhorred.

Or would have. Abhorrence was too much work.

"Wait until breakfast starts like everyone else. _Duuuuuuude."_ Raina rotated the iron back over before dumping a fresh waffle onto a plate in the little toaster oven.

"Duuuuude! I HAVE a name." Ears perked, Fitzie snarked back, "Jeremy Fitzgerald III."

"So, there's three of you out there. Fan-fuckery-doo-dah." Raina poured more batter into the waffle iron. She'd gotten pretty good at this, considering the first time she'd tried the damned thing out she nearly burned down the house – black smoke does not equal "done". That, and pieces of paper marked "directions" are more important than you'd think.

"Nah, Mom tacked the III on the end to make me sound more upscale than Jeremy Fitzgerald, the pointless dude who bangs his head on the wainscoting when he's not having meltdowns on the red carpet in front of Lady Gaga and a shitload of paprazzi during one of her Autism 1k/per plate Hollywood fundraisers – you gonna finish that?" Fitzie hopefully pushed his red doggie dish at Raina's bare ankles.

Raina paused mid-sip of iced coffee from her big "Chopper Pilots Do It Midair" mug, "No, but you can have your own. Sugar?"

She bent and poured the rest of the iced carafe into Fitzie's dish.

"How about six cubes of the good stuff, sweet cheeks? And a shot of that real whipped cream I saw you hide in the back of the fridge?"

"How about you want to fit the doggie door at two in the morning when you want to take a dump?" Raina added the requested drugs of choice anyway and put it down in front of the family, for lack of a better word, "dog".

"Babe, I got hands and a set of KEYS. I can open any damned door I want!" Fitzie shoved his muzzle into his dish and began messily slurping up the black liquid gold it held. Oh God, even cold, the stuff was delicious!

"Fair enough, _pies_ , pooch." Raina, though discouraged from learning how to cook as a child in favor of having a career, expertly flipped the next waffle onto the plate in the toaster oven and started another.

"Dude! Don't be racist. I'm a MUTT!" Fitzie paused mid-slurp, ears cocking. "Ummmm, like uh oh? We got company!" Tags jingling, he knocked the dish aside with a loud clatter as he raced out of the kitchen and into the living room bellowing, "Arf! Arf!" Puzzled, he paused mid-charge, "Ummmmm, or is it "woof"? Fuck it: stranger danger! Stranger danger!"

Raina attempted to drag Fitzie back by the collar as he scrabbled and slapped at the front door with its "Are you wearing pants?" sign at the same as Mike on the other side opened it so that about what felt like half of Salem spilled in, rattling and clicking as they shook the snow off of their feet and out of their hair.

Looks like Raina'd have to make more waffles.

That is, if whatever the Sargents _were_ , ate waffles.


	41. Strange Hair

_Salem, Oregon, November, Sunday, 201-_

 **Coat Drive**

Frankie Stein, plugged into her BeDazzled portable recharger, glanced out of her bedroom window in while posting unwanted clothes on Ebay.

The Schmidts had company.

Weird company.

This was saying a lot because RAD was RAD, but thanks to the Schmidts, Frankie had come to the uncomfortable realization that "Yes, we're all RAD brothers-sisters-whatevers, but some brothers-sisters-whatevers are more equal than others".

Really uncomfortable.

She'd seen Officer Schmidt's wife and nieces going into the nearby Goodwill. And it wasn't to make a donation.

It was to buy clothes.

She knew this when Puck showed up a few days later wearing a top that Draculaura donated because she didn't like the color… anyway, it was waaaaaaaaaay too big.

It was really awkward last week when she'd ordered a large pizza for a sleepover for her friends. Frankie didn't eat, but some of her besties did. The awkward part was when the pizza arrived, SRO Schmidt, in a Domino's uniform, stood in the doorway holding the pizza. Though extremely polite, he'd looked right through Frankie as she signed for it.

Like she didn't exist.

And that Tina Morph's dad cleaned up after everybody at the school. Rumor was, he restocked shelves at Costco most nights or ran a cash register at a convenience store because he had a lot of kids and his wife couldn't work.

Or that maybe Toby wore the same clothes every day because that was all he had when Frankie could go into the nearest mall and buy new clothes any time she wanted.

Or that the real reason Clawdeen was such a great fashion designer was that when you have enough brothers and sisters to staff a pro-football team, new, pretty clothes got shoved to the back of the line and that if you want to be able to keep up with your besties, thrifting and a sewing machine was the way to go.

Or that the Sargent twins, even if they were big time jocks, worked odd jobs after school to help pay the rent – so what if both their parents had full-time jobs.?

Speaking of jobs, Puck Schmidt, unapproachable as she was, worked at Chuck E. Cheese most nights after school, and it _probably_ wasn't because she wanted to earn money for a new designer purse. The only reason Frankie knew this was because she'd helped Clawdeen with a party there a month ago for Clawdeen's youngest siblings's shared birthday.

Knowing that a fellow RAD was wearing that icky mouse suit handing out balloons for minimum wage was… uncomfortable.

Frankie watched her neighbors, the Schmidts, and their guests, the Sargents and a little red-headed human-looking girl she didn't recognize, stuff themselves into the Stein's tiny guest house.

The door slammed behind them, the show was over.

Frankie turned back to her self-assigned task of cleaning out her closet and dressers by listing stuff she no longer wore on ebay. Sales were brisk. Better yet, Draculaura, Melody, and Clawdeen agreed to come over after breakfast with clothes and accessories they were tired of and help her list and pack things for shipping.

Predictably, Cleo deNile turned up her nose, "Ew." Such _common_ activities were _beneath_ her. But Frankie's other besties, once she'd told them about the Camp, its occupants, and their inexplicable poverty, eagerly agreed to Frankie's idea of trying to sell off as much of their unwanted things as possible to raise enough money to buy everyone at the Camp a new coat.

Even the ones with more than two arms – Clawdeen immediately volunteered to take care of that, so get going!

Lady Gaga blaring from her iPhone, Frankie paused in the middle of listing a Hermes handbag with the price tag still on it, thinking. She pulled out a bedazzled calculator and lips moving silently, began punching in numbers.

Frankie put down the calculator, beaming.

So far, between online sales minus shipping and her babysitting money, she had almost enough to buy most of the children at the Camp new coats. If she bought used coats from Goodwill, they could include hats, gloves, and boots.

But wouldn't it be nice if everyone could have all _new_ things?

 **Breakfast at Mike's**

It wasn't that Mike minded his nieces having friends over, now that they both were no longer grounded.

What ground Mike's gears was that not only had Toby come in uninvited through the kitchen back door, but that he'd EATEN EVERY LAST DAMNED WAFFLE Raina made for the big Sunday family breakfast – something Mike looked forward to all week.

Raina had gone into the kitchen to see what that burning smell was and there the nasty little turd sat, stickily surrounded by empty plates because not only had he helped himself to the plate of waffles keeping warm in the oven while the family sorted out their unexpected brunch guests, but he'd also eaten all the bacon, all the scrambled eggs, and all of Mikes favorite little sausages.

WORSE, Toby'd the balls to belch loudly at Raina when she demanded who the Hell he was and what was he doing in her kitchen.

That was when Jeremy shot beneath the table yelling "Bow-wow! Bow-wow!" until Mike dragged him out by the collar and tossed him out the back door to cool off only to discover that while he was distracted by the family's alleged "dog", the Toby quickly drank all the coffee and ate Mike's last raspberry filled donut, further pissing off Mike, who mainly existed on caffeine, donuts, and ultraviolet light.

 _Then_ there was the matter of BEN Drowned.

How the Hell had he got in without Mike noticing? They'd opened the front door to let everyone in and Puck his niece was dragging the kid around by one skinny leg like a whiny balloon – there'd been a long, awkward pause until Puck stammered that she'd invited some friends over to hang out now that she was no longer grounded and that she'd forgotten to tell them when to come so they like, dude, sorta showed up _whenever_ and that she was like, really-really-really sorry, and that BEN was home-schooled which was why Uncle Mike who remembered every kid at school's name and face (Big deal, that Igor kid installed a backup storage unit cobbled together from an old OCR device and then wired it into Mike's visual system just to see what would happen) which was why he didn't recognize BEN and that she and BEN worked together at Chuck E. Cheese ending with, "Ummmmmmmm, dude, I'm in really big trouble again, right Uncle Mike?"

"We'll discuss this later. Go help your aunt make more waffles." Mike rumbled down at her, wondering if they could afford to install a better security system. This was a good neighborhood, but two benign intruders in one day was too much. "But first, go make sure Mickey gets dressed before he wanders out butt nekkid in front of our company like he did that Jehovah's Witness yesterday!"

 **The Giving Tree that just keeps on giving.**

Ms. Helen Goode stared numbly at the remains of her living room from the remains of her couch.

Gerald's beloved Giving Tree now decorated the entire space and not in a good way.

She had been awakened by a long, groaning noise, followed by a loud crash as the half dead soft maple Gerald insisted nobody touch because it was a free and beautiful being worthy of everyone's love and respect, crashed through the bank of solar panels, through the neglected shingles, through the attic, through the ceiling, and onto her couch.

Where she'd been sleeping the last night or so because local Party leader Margot Jenson (who had an ecologically sustainable house with five bedrooms, an indoor swimming pool, and three bathrooms), insisted she take in Ms. R'achel Kinte-Redfang after bail had been posted, "For the good of the cause!"

Which meant that Ms. R'achel Kinte-Redfang was currently hogging, no… _SHARING_ Helen's bedroom.

And bathroom – all while constantly complaining about the lack of hot water and Ms. Helen Goode's perfectly good, much mended second hand cotton sheets because they weren't organic vegan silk.

After the last day or so of hosting R'achel and her bodyguards, had Helen still believed, she would have screamed up through her new cathedral ceiling at the snow-filled sky now visible through the bare branches surrounding her, "Haven't I been punished enough?"

This was after she ended up sending all six young men, who seemed more interested in smoking pot and picking fights with each other while complaining about her lack of a television than in actually guarding Ms. R'achel Kinte-Redfang's body.

On her own dime.

Which on a school counselor's salary, wasn't a very big dime— more like a penny, TBH.

No longer a believer in much of anything at the moment, Helen uttered a low, guttural moan as she watched the falling snow sift onto the remains of her living room.

Crawling shakily out from under the fallen tree and pieces of her ceiling before lifting the edge of the torn remains of her beloved mud cloth curtains from her Peace Corps days back when she and Gerald had exchanged vows they'd written themselves, Helen looked out the shattered picture window in her living room.

The one without any glass that was letting in the cold while letting out the passive solar heat.

The reporters camped out in the street waved at her.

Dropping the curtain, Helen turned away and leaned against the now cracked wall of her living room, arms folded over her stomach to face what was left of her kitchen.

The squirrel shitting on her kitchen counter chattered at her.

It sounded very, _very_ judgmental.

Mentally calculating the cost of having her house fixed in addition to her unplanned hospitality duties, Helen was too busy crying to shoo it away.

 **Football, Piggy Pops, and Sweet, Sweet Revenge**

Clawdeen's father was a man who, after a long week's construction work, liked to sit undisturbed in front of his television in his man, no WOLF cave after early Mass and a LARGE family lunch of mostly steak with a token potato in there somewhere wearing little more than boxers, socks, and his favorite undershirt regardless of what phase of the moon it was.

The game was on.

College, pro, high school— Mr. Wolf liked, no LOVED football. He would happily pull his truck over to watch a Pop Warner game on his coffee break involving little more than two teams of five-year olds whose helmets had been knocked sideways arguing over where the ball had got off to while the rest whined that they hadda go bafroom as attend the superbowl.

And yes, he liked his beer.

Nothing fancy, Bud would do.

And pork rinds. Popcorn gave him gas.

Something his wife and daughters loudly objected to.

Hell, Piggy Pops were crunchy and salty, plus they went well with beer.

Satisfied, the very, _very_ working-class werewolf settled down for snacks, beer, football, long luxurious scratching in places best not mentioned in public, and peace.

Beautiful, beautiful peace.

The phone on the tv tray howled.

Shit.

Eyes glued to the touchdown in progress on the flat screen, Mr. Wolf answered. "Yeah." Followed by a grunt.

Great, Mr. Wolf rolled his eyes, it was Ms. Helen Goode, Salem's bestest most well-intentioned SJW, yappin' something or other about a tree loaded with snow landing her eco-friendly living room. She knew it was Sunday, but could he do something about it right away? There was snow coming in!

Shit. Still, _money_ , and he didn't have to do anything personally. After all, he had nearly two football team's worth of strapping, hairy offspring he could send out to deal with it. Randy was getting married in a few days – he could use the money…

No, wait… heyyyyyyyyyy… "I gots me a bettah idea…" Scratching his mid-lunar cycle pelage, Mr. Wolf grinned, showing far too many teeth for a human mouth.

Mike Schmidt, who sometimes subcontracted for Wolf after hours, could go.

He owed Schmidt, or rather, he owed Schmidt's bratty nieces.

Big time.

Seems the one part of Merston High, when it was rebuilt two years ago, that Tepes hadn't hired Wolf's ever expanding pack of sons and daughters to do the plumbing along with the rest of the contracting.

He'd hired some non-union out of stater that wasn't even a RAD.

And it served him right, the cheap bastid – that toidy shouldn't have broken off under the weight of the two girls the way it had.

The pipes shouldn't have burst the way they did when they did.

And caused as much flooding the way they did when they did.

Shutting down the entire school after Tepes called Wolf and his family in to repair the damage.

Who were about to bill Mr. Tepes three times the amount he'd saved by hiring out of state non-union labor to do the plumbing.

"Heh-heh-heh. How's it feel bein' broke like the rest of us, shawty? Shoulda hired the right man, no WOLF, for the job in the first place!"

And now, in return, Mr. Wolf was about to share the wealth even as he gloated over his fancy-schmancy cash-strapped social superior's big ol' plumbing bill.

Piggy Pops and beer forgotten, Clawdeen's dad happily assured Ms. Goode that he was sending someone out to deal with the problem IMMEDIATELY.

Schmidt wasn't a werewolf, but he was a RAD, and he owed Mr. Wolf big time for covering the damage.

Let him deal with Ms. Good-Intentions.

 **The Giving Tree that still keeps on giving.**

Mike shut off the chainsaw and one-handedly dragged the huge dead branch he'd severed from the main trunk of the tree in Ms. Goode's living room out the front door.

He hadn't wanted to leave the big family brunch, guests and all, but he owed Wolf – Wolf had covered the damage Puck and Maggie dumbass pee pee dance caused to the school.

He'd already dipped into the family savings once to cover Maggie's shopping addiction; savings they couldn't afford to use if Charlie ever showed up demanding her pound of flesh.

So, here he was, snow landing heavily on the plastic sheeting he'd put over the hole in the roof when he'd rather be eating the second batch of waffles Raina and Mickey had made.

Still, work was what Mike was built for, and well, this was work.

He dropped the branch onto the growing pile beside the political lawn sign that said, "A vote for R'achel Kinte-Redfang is a vote for Equality!" beside the borrowed truck from Mr. Wolf and one-handedly adjusted what he thought was the watch cap he'd put on during the drive over to hide his physical differences.

Only to freeze.

Oh, shit, he'd forgotten to take the damned wig off!

The one that the Sargents, who were now eating waffles (M'binte, their translator assured him that they'd only seen waffles on television and really liked them, especially when soaked with the Windex they'd brought along with a large ham.) in the clean, dry, and above all, WARM kitchen back home, had given him

The Sargent brothers had brought it out of the hall closet and put it on his head. More interested in waffles and ham, Mike'd allowed this to happen mid-bite.

Then the phone rang.

It was Mr. Wolf. He had an emergency for Mike to take care of.

And it would cover what Mike owed Clawdeen's dad for his quietly paying for Puck and Maggie's property damage.

So, now, here he was, wearing a funny hat removing a tree from the living room of one of the biggest pains in the asses he'd ever met, and for some reason, there were reporters watching him from across the street.

Ignoring them, they weren't his problem, Mike trudged back into the house for more branch removal.

 **"A Vote for Me is a Vote for Equality!"**

Ms. R'achel Kinte-Redfang was the kind of politician who, whenever she had a public life-malfunction, made a point of quickly pointing a finger at someone else while screaming in outrage in order to focus the eyes of her audience away from her long enough for them to forget that she'd "screwed the pooch" and vote for her anyway.

The Harvest Dance brawl wasn't her fault.

It had been the shitty little trannie's fault, LGBT rights be damned – HE should have known better than to mess with R'achel.

Nor was that stolen gun going off on school property.

In front of the national media

She was an important, woke woman.

She needed bodyguards. She needed an entourage.

And if "keeping it real" meant hiring one from the Watts district of L.A. who sold illegal recreational substances on the side as well as a little pimping, it wasn't her fault.

The means justified the end, dig?

Bob, her campaign manager, had just informed her that the avalanche of memes aimed at her he'd just seen via Facebook and Imgur weren't doing her run at public office in Salem, Oregon any good. Some had come from as far away as Russia.

Still, _not_ her fault that _everyone but her_ was _racist_.

Anyway, mom and dad down in Orange County had refused to post her bail, forcing the local Democratic Party to pick up the tab before whisking her here in a non-descript Uber because after Halloween's unforeseen brawl, going to her house in Salem's second-most exclusive gated community would only bring more attention to her, _ahem_ , recently acquired political liabilities.

And by association, _them._

Ooooooh, would you look at that? There were media reps on the sidewalk across the street. Her deliberate leak of her location on both Imgur and Facebook had paid off.

Faaaaaaaannnnnnnn-tasssss-TIC!

R'achel stepped out of Ms. Goode's tacky little bedroom and into the remains of her tacky little living room with its culturally appropriated mud cloth curtains and African tribal masks to the sound of a chainsaw, looking for something to scream in outrage over in order to let herself off of the political hook.

And oh me oh my, did she ever find one.

He was big.

He was dumb.

Best of all he was white, if the straw-colored dreadlocks hanging down between his shoulders were any indication.

Blonde box braids whipping behind her R'achel wrapped her custom leopard print Hermes bathrobe more tightly against the cold her as she strode with joyous indignation towards Mike as he started dragging another limb out of Helen Goode's living room.

"Yo! Crackuh! Don't you turn yo' racist back on me when I'm talkin' t' you!"

Her target, halfway to the growing pile of branches, kept going, big booted feet treading mechanically.

R'achel paused. Hmmmmmm, should she whip out "Nazi" or "Honkie"? next? "Honkie" was dated, but older voters would know what she meant and older voters were more likely to vote than younger voters – "Nazi" she'd save for later when shit really got real, soooooo, "Yo, HONKIE!"

Aware of the media crews that were surging across the street and onto the property, R'achel smiled; her groove had returned.

R'achel, Self-appointed Voice of the Marginalized knew this the second the big moron stopped, dropped the branch he was dragging and slowly turned to face her as she sauntered in for the kill across the icy quagmire which had once been Helen Goode's neglected lawn in her custom gold lame Uggs.

Oh shit.

R'achel stopped dead in her tracks.

She hadn't realized how fucking big "Crackuh" was.

Size of a SUV or not, she had the media's attention aimed away from her and at the best target she'd sighted in on in YEARS. Taking courage from the watching media and the worn NRA, Marine Corps, and Knights of Columbus stickers displayed in the back window of the Wolf Family, General Contractors truck he'd arrived in, R'achel resumed her swagger, braids shining pale gold in the snowlight, towards Mike, mouth primed for bear: "You dissin' me, huh? Huh? Don't you know cultural appropriation is…" With relish, R'achel pulled out her big gun, "…DEE-PLOR-ABLE.?"

Her hulking target turned and stared down at her, mouth opening and closing slightly.

R'achel, delicious "d" word echoing in the space between the two of them, nearly bit her own tongue. For a few seconds she'd seen a face that looked like something out of a burn ward. Shaking her head, she blinked, the disturbing vision was replaced by the face of a man in his late thirties, Caucasian, blue eyed, and perfectly symmetrical

Framed like a lions mane by the offensive dreadlocks.

They were beaded.

With little skulls.

"Y'all need somethin', m'am?" was his quiet, rumbling reply.

In a _Cracker_ accent.

R'achel all but whooped out loud, discombobulation completely forgotten: oooooh, dis gonna be _GOOD!_

A reporter with the logo of a local network on his microphone called out, "SRO Schmidt, good to see you! It's been a month since the school shooting. How are you and your family handling it?"

School shooting?

R'achel's triumph ratcheted down a notch.

Oh.

That.

Was this big bohunk that guy? Crap!

The man held out a microphone towards Crackuh. R'achel frowned. This wasn't how it was supposed to be. She had to yank the wheel back, she had to get home boy riled to the point of something newsworthy, she had to point out that wearing dreadlocks while being white was colonialism at its worst, _she had to be the one on top!_

"We do ok. We just want our privacy, is all." was homeboy's low drawling reply. (Was that a glint of steel teeth?)

R'achel scowled, this wasn't how it was supposed to be. Time to ratchet up the controversy with her turning the crank, "I SAID, CRACK- _UH,_ you have no RIGHT to these dreadlocks!" sure she had world's attention, R'achel jabbed a designer nailed finger at the top of Whitebread's head, adding, "That's cultural appropriation - you're a RACIST for wearing them!" Stepping over her flattened political yard sign, R'achel reached up, grabbed Mike's golden dreadlocks, and gave a hard yank,

Only to have the controversial hair come away in her hands, little skulls and all...

 **Interlude Among Artists**

…roughly about the time the Mr. Sargent and his twin sons, their own dreadlocks swinging heavily in the snow-laden air shimmered into sight around her.

M'binte had translated to them that Mike was leaving to deal with a fallen tree.

Mr. Sargent, Tedator, had put down his sock knitting in the middle of Fredator's recitation of his latest epic (That of Raina and Mike's courtship – he'd overheard the story and had decided that the EPIC tale of a hard-hitting Maiden roughly showing a Buck his place before snatching him from the talons of the Dark Hunter himself, deserved to be commemorated in song.) Seeing as he still needed chairs for the big family table he'd just finished building, maybe Mike would give him the tree as a gift?

After all, Mr. Sargent had supplied the Windex and the ham for this morning's holiday feast – value for value.

So, they'd jogged after the truck before politely standing off to the side at a distance, invisible.

This Maiden was interesting. He'd never seen hair like hers up close. It was like weaving.

Risking further rudeness, the very curious Mr. Sargent revealed himself and his sons, courteously removing their breathing masks to let the newcomer know who they were while spreading their mandibles in at her in the traditional gesture of friendship.

 **R'achel**

R'achel froze pop-eyed with what was now obviously a hat swinging from one hand, the reporters eagerly surging towards her.

Where the hell had THEY come from?

Stifling a scream, she backed up as they bared their… their… whatever those things were – R'achel self-identified as a RAD as well as black, but what kind of RADs were THESE? Dimly she felt warmth trickle down the insides of her thighs and puddle yellowy in the snow at her feet while her eyes frantically scrambled back up the height of whitebread's broad-shouldered body at what the wig had concealed.

Ears.

Like a bear's

In cotton candy pink.

"Oh dear God," she thought, "I've just picked a fight with an actual RAD. In front of the whole damn world!" Dropping the wig Ms. R'achel Kinte-Redfang backed away, Tedator catching the ceremonial headpiece before it landed in the muddy snow. "But it's _his_ fault, not mine. That sneaky racist son of a bitch should have let it all hang out so I'd know!" She added a few heartbeats later.

Mandibles clattering apologetically, Tedator and his twin put the dreads back on Mike's head as the media representatives uploaded more meme fodder at R'achel's expense.

Crackuh would pay for humiliating her. From the tips of his absurd teddy-bear ears all the way down to his worn, muddy work boots.

But not right now.

Pointedly ignoring the media gathered behind her, R'achel sauntered cooly towards the lame little cracker box of a house she'd been staying in.

Only to find the drab little white mouse who owned it, blocking her way, hands on hips.

"I think it's time for you to go home, don't you?" was all Ms. Helen Goode said before adding, "Oh, and before I forget, _to whom do I send the hotel bill for your body-guards?_ The Mariott just informed me that they did at over $1,000 worth of damage last night before the police were called. Do I send it to you, or do I send it to the local Democratic party?"

Somebody laughed behind R'achel's back, a high pitched, feminine giggle quickly joined by a whole lot of other media personalities. It took everything R'achel had left to her not to turn around.

A few minutes later, the remains of R'achel's political yard sign was in Ms. Helen Goode's recycling bin, R'achel was once again in an Uber, and Ms. Helen Goode was offering tofu donuts and organic coffee sweetened with Windex borrowed from her neighbors to the four large individuals who were busy removing Gerald's Giving Tree from her living room after she'd chased out the judgmental squirrel.


End file.
